As both writer and personality, he perfectly illustrated his times. A flamboyant publicist, he directed the public eye upon himself at the outset of the period he helped to name "The Gilded Age." His intermittent lecture tours took him to numerous towns and cities, where his face became as familiar as his famous pen name. Initially he wrote in the vein of the humorous tales and sketches that were appearing in newspapers and magazines during and after the Civil War, and in 1867 Charles Henry Webb published Mark Twain's first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Subsequently he traveled as a columnist for both West Coast and East Coast newspapers, and eventually collected and revised a portion of this correspondence as a travel narrative of his journey to the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869). After producing another travel narrative about his sojourn in the Far West, Roughing It (1872), Twain turned to novel writing. His first effort, The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, is mainly read today as a period piece commentary on postwar American society. But around the time of his marriage to Olivia L.
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