The Innocents Abroad
by Mark Twain · first published 1800
16mentions
4recommended by
14HN commenters
2012–2026first – last mentioned
29% recommend64% neutral7% critical
Twain's letters about his steamship voyage of 1867.
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I started reading (not yet finished) The Innocents Abroad from Mark Twain. The book was recommended in a previous thread on HN I think. It's an hilarious read and at the same time it's also interesting to read how people lived in Europe and the Middle East…
on “Ask HN: What were the best fun books you read in 2014?” ↗And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its…
on “Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be” ↗Actually, check out his book, "Innocents Abroad." It's a great travel native and lampoon of his cruising companions who manage to stay small-minded in a big world.
on “Going to university does not broaden the mind” ↗Definitely Twain and it's not even close. Huckleberry Finn even has the episodic flavor of The Odyssey. For books you have "The Innocents Abroad", "Roughing It", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "A Tramp Abroad", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Life on the Mississippi", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s…
on “Who Is America's Homer?” ↗…people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
on “For the love of Earth, stop traveling” ↗"God created war so that Americans would learn geography." - Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad
on “Can You Locate Iran? Few Voters Can” ↗I've tried reading a few different editions of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad. The first one was free (public domain) but the formatting was so terrible I couldn't get through the first page. The text was center aligned, missing periods. Then I bought a version of it for $3 thinking…
on “Planet eBook – Classic literature publications formatted for popular devices” ↗"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." - Mark Twain I really dislike this quote since is so obviously false. If you read Twain (e.g. Innocents Abroad) you've got to believe he was being ironic when he said this.
on “How to travel around the world for a year (2011)” ↗When Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869 contained: The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has…
on “Has Travel Become Another Exercise in Narcissism?” ↗If you read "The Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain (written in ~1850 or so), he writes a lot about the bad treatment of dogs in Arab countries (or at least in Turkey).
on “Why Cats Were Hated in Medieval Europe” ↗It is curious that you should post this, for Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad shows signs of reacting against Ruskin's preference for the pre-Raphaelites. And I suspect Lewis Carroll of taking Ruskin at a bit less than the standard valuation, given the lines from "Hiawatha's Photographing":…
on “John Ruskin Taught Victorian Readers and Travelers the Art of Cultivation” ↗…from their families, converted to Islam, trained into Janissaries, and sent back to kill their own people) As for Syria/Iraq, it wasn't any pretty under Ottoman rule. Perhaps a quote from Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad describing Damascus massacre can help paint the picture. They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by…
…human history of experiences. “One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
on “‘Tired’, ‘lonely’ and hated by locals: the reality for the digital nomad” ↗…Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/list/7-surprising-uses-for-mummie...: “It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Egypt. Because of the lack of trees and the price of coal, Twain claims that the Egyptians used mummies instead. He wrote, “[The fuel used] for the locomotive is…
on “Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?” ↗…or travel the hippie trail from Europe to India? Or the interwar expat Americas like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway? Or the popular travel writings of Mark Twain ("The Innocents Abroad", "A Tramp Abroad", "Following the Equator")?
on “Why Millennials Shouldn't Be Scared of Automation” ↗