سأضع في اعتباري في هذه السيرة الذاتية أني أتحدث إليكم من وراء القبر.. وأني سوف أكون في عداد الأموات حين يصدر هذا الكتاب.. لقد بدا لي أنه يمكنني أن أتحدث بمطلق الصراحة والحرية– كما لو كنت أكتب رسالة غرامية– في حال تأكد لي أنّ ما سأكتبه لن تقع عليه عين إلا بعد وفاتي وتحرري من قيود هذه الدنيا.

The owner of a cat, dog, bird, ape, frog, elk, deer, and a multitude of other animals finds new homes for all but one.

The Innocents Abroad is based on correspondence Twain sent to two newspapers recounting his experiences during five months aboard a cruise ship.

Mark Twain wrote a series of travel letters whilst on a tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1867 with a group of American pilgrimsA". These letters later formed the basis of The Innocents Abroad. Journeying from New York to Egypt via France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Russia, Turkey and the Holy Land, he observed and lampooned his companions with typically caustic and incisive commentary. The local people he encountered fared little better. In frequently humorous, sometimes grotesque detail, Twain records the day-to-day ups and downs of discovering the truth about people and places, while pillorying those tourists who rely on guidebooks rather than their own impressions to define their experiences.

Published under the full name The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress, this became Mark Twain's best selling book during his life and one of the best-selling travel books of all time. It is a detailed narrative of a long excursion with a group of fellow travelers to the Holy Land shortly after the Civil War aboard the Quaker City.

Twain describes his experiences traveling in Europe and the Middle East, and pokes fun at tourists and tour guides.

One of the most famous travel books ever written by an American, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain’s irreverent and incisive commentary on nineteenth century Americans encountering the Old World. Come along for the ride as Twain and his unsuspecting travel companions visit the Azores, Tangiers, Paris, Rome, the Vatican, Genoa, Gibraltar, Odessa, Constantinople, Cairo, the Holy Land and other locales renowned in history. No person or place is safe from Twain’s sharp wit as it impales both the conservative and the liberal, the Old World and the New. He uses these contrasts to “find out who we as Americans are,” notes Leslie A. Fiedler. But his travelogue demonstrates that, in our attempt to understand ourselves, we must first find out what we are not. With an Introduction Michael Meyer and an Afterword by Leslie A. Fiedler