Poll

How is A Tramp Abroad early American Literature? It was published in 1880, 4 years after the nation’s Centennial.

Domini, good question! When our group was started (back in 2020), the founding moderator, Joanna, set World War I as the rough dividing point between the "early" American literature that we focus on, vs. the later writings that are outside our scope as a group. (That's in the group description, on the home page.) One of our earliest common reads was of Robert Frost's poetry collection North of Boston (1914). We've also already read a couple of other books by Mark Twain as group reads.

I've not read "A Tramp Abroad" but I have read "The Innocents Abroad" by Twain. (Which is one of my favorite books.) - I have forgotten about "A Tramp Abroad" and I must add it to my list.

Just now, I discovered that this group already did a group read (in which I did not take part) of The Sketch Book back in October of 2020; that discussion thread is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... . This wasn't immediately apparent, because the edition to which Joanna linked the read in her first post used a different title, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories.

I apologize to the group for failing to catch this earlier, before the current poll was set up and people were voting on it! Given that it's now come to light, though, I'm inclined to think that we probably don't want to do a repeat group read of a book we read about a year and a half ago. Under the circumstances, is there a consensus that we should declare A Tramp Abroad (which is already leading by a wide margin) as the poll winner by default?