Chasing The Last Laugh: How Mark Twain Escaped Debt And Disgrace With A Round-The-World Comedy Tour

Chasing The Last Laugh: How Mark Twain Escaped Debt And Disgrace With A Round-The-World Comedy Tour

From the bestselling author of The Pirate Hunter and Island of Vice—a rich and lively account of how Mark Twain’s late-life adventures abroad helped revive his famous sense of humor.

In 1895, at age sixty, Mark Twain was dead broke and miserable—his most recent novels had been critical failures and he had been bankrupted by his inexplicable decision to try to run a publishing company. His wife made him promise to pay back every debt in full, so Twain embarked on an ambitious five-year lecture tour that would take him from the American West to India, South Africa, Australia, and beyond.

In Chasing the Last Laugh, Richard Zacks, drawing extensively on unpublished notebooks and letters from Berkeley’s ongoing Mark Twain Project, chronicles a poignant chapter in the author’s life—one that began in foolishness and bad choices but culminated in humor, hard-won wisdom, and ultimate triumph.