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Following the Equator or
More Tramps Abroad (English title) is a non-fiction
travelogueTravel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
published by
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author
Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
in 1897.
Twain was practically bankrupt in 1894 due to a failed investment into a "revolutionary" typesetting machine. In an attempt to extricate himself from debt of $100,000 (equivalent of about $2.5 million in 2010) he undertook a tour of the British Empire in 1895, a route chosen to provide numerous opportunities for lectures in the
English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
.
Themes
In
Following the Equator, an account of that travel published in 1897, the author criticizes racism, imperialism and missionary zeal in observations woven into the narrative with classical Twain wit.
In keeping with that wit, and Twain's love of a tall tale, Twain included a number of fictional stories in the body of what is otherwise a non-fiction work. In particular, the story of how Cecil Rhodes made his fortune by finding a newspaper in the belly of a shark, and the story of how a man named Ed Jackson made good in life out of a fake letter of introduction to Cornelius Vanderbilt, were anthologized in Charles Neider (ed)
The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, (Doubleday, 1957) where they are presented as fiction.
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