Because of the acclaim of Roughing It, Twain gave up his career as a journalist-reporter and began writing seriously. His fame as a writer was immediate; one of his first efforts, Innocents Abroad, became an immediate best seller, and it is still one of his most popular works. The satire that Twain uses to expose the so-called sophistication of the Old World, in contrast to the old-fashioned Yankee common sense, is similar to that found some years later in A Connecticut Yankee, when Hank Morgan confronts nobility and knighthood. But it was the Mississippi River and the values of the people who lived along its length that have made Twain one of America's best and favorite storytellers. The humor which he found there, along with its way of life, has continued to fascinate readers and to embody an almost mythic sense of what it meant to be a young American in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
After Twain turned fifty, however, his fortunes reversed themselves; his health began to fail and he faced bankruptcy; in addition, his wife became a semi-invalid, one daughter developed epilepsy, and his oldest daughter died of meningitis. Yet Twain survived. He became a critic and an essayist, and he became more popular as a satirist than as a humorist. The body of work which he left behind is immense and varied — poetry, sketches, journalistic pieces, political essays, novels, and short stories — all a testament to the diverse talent and energy which used the folklore of frontier America to create authentic American masterpieces of enduring value.
