Mark Twain at Large: His Travels Here and Abroad

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Clemens’s lifelong habit of travel (United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa)left both literary and documentary remains: correspondence with people throughout the world, notebooks, lecture texts, hotel bills, invitations, newspaper clippings, mementos, photographs both posed and candid, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as the familiar travel books and articles. The Mark Twain Papers of The Bancroft Library, a collection whose core consists of the thousands of manuscripts Clemens himself kept to the end of his life, is the repository for the overwhelming majority of these remains. The collection is a balance of his well-known travel writings with less familiar items, to reflect the range of Clemens’s attitudes and activities. It would have been impossible to touch upon all the places that he visited or to represent everything he wrote about them, but the collection is a view into the chronology of his travels, from his earliest trips in America to his final visit to Bermuda in 1910.