LITERATURE

Mark Twain is arguably the most famous and influential writer in American history. His legacy is defined by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But little to nothing is known about the crucial years during which Samuel Clemens transformed himself into the beloved American writer we celebrate today as Mark Twain.

Backed by solid scholarship but never dry, Lighting Out for the Territory is the first full-length study of Mark Twain’s life-changing time in the still-Wild West and where he began his writing career and shaped himself into an American favorite.

Roy Morris is the editor of Military Heritage magazine and the author of five previous books on the Civil War era, including The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (Smithsonian Books, 2008); Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (Simon and Schuster, 2003); and The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2000). A former newspaper reporter and political correspondent for The Chattanooga News-Free Press and The Chattanooga Times, Morris was the founding editor of America's Civil War magazine and has served as a consultant for A&E Network and the History Channel.