From the Introduction:
The second volume of this collection follows Clemens from his first days as a resident journalist in California, late in May 1864, through the end of his first full year as a California resident, 1865. In this twenty-month period he wrote most of his work for the San Francisco Golden Era, the Morning Call, the Dramatic Chronicle, and the Californian. He began to publish somewhat more regularly in eastern journals, like the New York Saturday Press and the Weekly Review, and toward the end of the period he started a long assignment as the daily correspondent from San Francisco to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In November 1865 he published "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" [no. 119] and by the beginning of 1866 the news of its success with eastern readers had begun to filter back to California. He was on the verge of national and international fame as a humorist.

This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to "write but little for periodicals hereafter." In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close. The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description—the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.

"What am I writing? A historical tale of 300 years ago, simply for the love of it." Mark Twain's "tale" became his first historical novel, The Prince and the Pauper, published in 1881. Intricately plotted, it was intended to have the feel of history even though it was only the stuff of legend. In sixteenth-century England, young Prince Edward (son of Henry VIII) and Tom Canty, a pauper boy who looks exactly like him, are suddenly forced to change places. The prince endures "rags & hardships" while the pauper suffers the "horrible miseries of princedom." Mark Twain called his book a "tale for young people of all ages," and it has become a classic of American literature.

The first edition in 1881 was fully illustrated by Frank Merrill, John Harley, and L. S. Ipsen. The boys in these illustrations, Mark Twain said, "look and dress exactly as I used to see them cast in my mind. . . . It is a vast pleasure to see them cast in the flesh, so to speak." This Mark Twain Library edition exactly reproduces the text of the California scholarly edition, including all of the 192 illustrations that so pleased the author.

This is a small sampling of Mark Twain's life-long fulminations against the editors, printers, and proofreaders who, subtly or grossly, altered his work and shrouded his intentions as they transmitted his writing from manuscript to type. Through unauthorized changes and inadvertent errors, Mark Twain's first publishers brought out texts full of thousands of errors in form and content. Later publishers then based their reprints on these corrupt editions and added errors of their own. It is the aim of the Iowa-California edition to strip away this accretion of error and present texts faithful to the author's intention. By comparing all the life-time version of Mark Twain's works, the editors are able to isolate the author's revisions from the printers and publishers' changes. The record of this comparison supplies not only the evidence for editorial decisions, but also the history of the author's efforts to shape his work. In addition, these volumes include previously uncollected work, work that has long been out of print, and such unpublished writing as related drafts, working notes, and marginalia. The texts are established at the Center for Textual Studies at the University of Iowa or at the Mark Twain Papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The costs for editorial work have been met by generous support from the Editing Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, and other institutional and private donors. The edition is published by the University of California Press with financial assistance from the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. All volumes are submitted to the Center for Editions of american Authors, or to its successor, the Committee for Scholarly Editions, for examination and approval

Based on Mark Twain's own years of "variegated vagabonding" in the West, this comic narrative offers a virtual grab-bag of tall tales, folklore, beast fables, travelogue, local color, autobiography, history, geography—even statistics. This new critical edition of Roughing Itsupersedes the 1972 edition published in the Works of Mark Twain over twenty years ago. It is an entirely new undertaking, by a different group of editors. Together they have made extensive use of newly discovered historical and textual materials, particularly biographical documents which illuminate how Mark Twain gave literary shape to his actual experiences in the West.

This edition includes the more than 300 illustrations Mark Twain commissioned for his book. It also provides six new maps: two for Nevada in the 1860s and four to help trace the Clemens brothers' cross-country stagecoach route. The editors provide a comprehensive introduction that will supplant all previous accounts of how Mark Twain wrote and revised his second long book. Fully supplemented by the textual apparatus, the edition presents a complete record of Twain's revisions and is sure to become the standard text of Mark Twain's great Western adventure.

Editorial work was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by a generous gift from the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation.