I recently finished reading The Sagebrush Bohemian by Nigey Lennon, an insightful and entertaining account of Mark Twain's formative years as a journalist and writer in the West. The young Twain, still known as Samuel Clemens at the time, moved West to make his fortune as a gold miner but soon turned to journalism to put food on the table. During his years living in Nevada and California, Twain grew from a frontier journalist to a humorist and man of letters.
He wrote initially for the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise, where he earned a reputation as a colorful writer, albeit one who played loose with the facts. Twain's editor soon discovered, in the words of Lennnon, that "his new recruit had a constitutional disregard for factuality. Twain seemed to think he owed to his readers to prevent mundane reality from boring them to death." The editor put Twain to work spinning tales and he quickly gained a reputation throughout the West.
Twain was offered a position on the San Francisco Morning Call and jumped at the chance to write for a larger audience. At the Morning Call, Twain had to be a real reporter and while he complained about the job, he recognized the advantages. "No other occupation," he wrote later, "brings a man into such familiar sociable relations with all grades and classes of people . . . Why I breakfasted almost every morning with the Governor, dined with the principal clergymen, and slept in the station house."