Mark Twain in the Desert

Abstract

Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad contrasts the populated, ruin-strewn Holy Land desert with the wild terrain of the arid American West. Twain’s text reflects the pervasive anxiety that the U.S., like Twain’s Middle East, will become wholly settled and domesticated and will thus lose its claim to religious, cultural, and political exceptionalism. The Innocents Abroad deserves consideration as a pioneering work of desert nature writing for its nuanced descriptions of the flora and fauna of Middle Eastern and U.S. deserts. The text’s preoccupation with natural landscapes suggests that for Twain, domesticating the wild American desert would be a fundamental loss to American culture.