Following the Equator

Mark Twain’s last major travel book records the lecture tour he undertook in 1895 and 1896 to pay off crushing debts, a route that carried him from the American West to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, Mauritius, and South Africa. He mixes brisk reporting with tall tales, hotel grievances, and close observation, and his real subject is often the machinery of the British Empire and the peoples living under it. The witty epigraphs from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar” open each chapter with a sharpened maxim. Behind the jokes runs a serious argument against colonial cruelty and racial contempt, which makes the book both an entertaining circuit of the globe and one of Twain’s most pointed public attacks on imperialism.