It was no coincidence that Clemens made such extensive use of the travel-book format or, moreover, that so many readers admired these works. Clemens recognized the lucrative sales potential of the genre and capitalized on it throughout his varied career. Consistently, his travel books proved to be his best-sellers. His sales figures previous to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are especially indicative of this success. In its first three years of publication The Innocents Abroad sold more than one hundred thousand copies, about seventy thousand of them in the first year. Roughing It sold more than seventy-six thousand copies in its first two years, ninety-six thousand by 1879. A Tramp Abroad sold sixty-two thousand in its first year. Life on the Mississippi was the only one of his early travel books to struggle, yet more than thirty-two thousand copies were sold in its first year.
None of his three fictional works of the same period matched the sales of his travel works. The Gilded Age (1873), cowritten with Charles Dudley Warner, took more than six years to sell fifty-six thousand copies. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) sold only twenty-four thousand copies in its first year.
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