This was a great book. All Farrell devotees should read it. As for one of the other comments. Dorothy B. Farrell, James' wife is still very much alive, trust me.

This fine book is remarkable for many reasons. It presents an excellent portrait of Farrell just as he was getting underway as a soon-to-be prominent novelist. Additionally, it offers an unusual and refreshing look at literary Paris in the early 1930s-recreating the scene as the Farrells (still in their 20s) saw and experienced it. Previously neglected writers such as expatriate Bob Brown (and his wonderfully zany Roving Eye Press) are given their due here. The amount of day-by-day detail in this book is amazing; what's more, it is both scholarly and loving. As always, Edgar Branch has done wonderful field work too (in both Chicago and Paris) with his trusty camera. This book is a must for JTF devotees. Further, it ought to be read by anyone with an interest in the intense American/Parisian literary and publishing scene of the late 20s and early 30s; or the making of American literature, period. It reads like something of a novel itself.Dorothy Farrell, who is still very much alive, must have been amazed by it. You will be to when you buy the book.

James and Dorothy Farrell are dead. They are not co-authors of this book. They are the subject of the book. Someone was either asleep or smoking funny cigarettes when they prepared this entry, which needs to be fixed. The only author is Edgar Marquess Branch. After you get this fixed, you might also note that the book is a finalist in this year's Society of Midland Authors Awards for biography. Thank you.

I actually haven't read the book. But give it 5 Stars for the title alone. I will read it to determine the relationship of Twain to the Starches.

This volume of effervescence gives off more sparks than a campfire from "Roughing It". It also provides terrific context for a group of essays by Shelly Fisher Fishkin "Lighting Out for the Territories". For real fun read David Carkeet's modern recreation of Twain "I Been Here Before", a book Twain would have somehow wished to be included in his canon. Don't be surprised if someday Carkeet's book is included as a companion volume to the Oxford Mark Twain.

There has been so little written about James T. Farrell that this book comes as a welcome entry. It gives a very nice overview of the Chicago that James T. Farrell grew up in. And it juxtaposes the Chicago of his many novels with the geographic locations. In my opinion, James T. Farrell is a wonderful novelist who has not gotten enough publicity among the academic community. Read "Studs Lonigan" and you have a marvelous portrait of the Depression years in urban America. Read "The Silence of History" and you have a brilliant depiction of a man's soul.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of travel logs, journals, reports, diaries, etc. that tell about the American West in the mid-nineteenth century. This book by Mark Twain, however, is both unique and one of the best. This is travel writing as it should be. Twain, traveling across the plains from Missouri to Nevada in the early 1860's, and spending seven years loafing about Nevada, California, and Hawaii, collected and compiled his experiences into this extraordinary book. One of the best things about Twain, of course, is his unique view on things. This tale is told in Twain's wry, humorous style, and is very enjoyable.

This book is not quite as pessimistic as Twain's other great travel writing, 'The Innocents Abroad,' but it does include some interesting and unorthodox views which often prove hilarious. Twain spends time as a gold and silver seeker, a speculator, a journalist, and a vagabond (as he himself puts it), and puts a unique spin on each of these occupations. As far as travel writing goes, this book is indispensable, and it also proves quite valuable (odd as it may seem) in any thorough study of frontier life in the American West.

I am a seventeen year old male, and I can say that I found this book to be very cool! When I first started reading it I figured it probably would be very dated and probably not hold my interest but I was wrong, I found it to be very engrossing. I did read Huckelberry finn, and though it is considered the great american novel it did not hold my interest like roughing it did. The book covers Twains adventures out west during the late 1800's. lots of adventure and humor.

...

A long-time fan of Mark Twain, I had still managed to make it past my fortieth birthday never having read this book. But recently, when I needed something to read (you know the kind of days I am talking about), I stumbled across this book and set to laughing.

The story-telling is magnificent. Few writers can take the small things of daily life and make them breathe -- but Twain possessed that gift, and uses it well. How many others went West the same time he did, and never saw the gold dust, sunsets, and taverns the way he wrote them into our consciousness?

And yet, and yet... As much as I loved the stories he told, I see "Roughing It" as important in a different manner. Even when the truth is slightly embellished to make us, his readers (of whom he is always very much aware), laugh out loud, it still truly presents the era and place he put down in black and white. We can be so bombarded with romanticized movies about the gold rush and settlers heading West, that we lose sight of them as genuine people with the same faults and virtues we know in 2001.

But with Mark Twain's keen eye, our history -- our American history -- comes to life. And suddenly, we "get it", we comprehend that all that stuff we had to learn in high school was done by people, not daguerrotypes.