Fairest Picture: Mark Twain at Lake Tahoe

"Fairest Picture: Mark Twain at Lake Tahoe" by David C. Antonucci describes the famed American literary master's experiences and travels to our shores. Fairest Picture is the first and only book to describe Lake Tahoe as it was in Mark Twain’s time and reveal in detail the locations where he traveled, camped and stayed at 19th century hotels.
September 2011 marked exactly 150 years since Samuel L. Clemens, known widely as Mark Twain, first visited Lake Tahoe. He arrived with the unrealized goal of staking a timber claim but returned less than two years later as Mark Twain, reporter and columnist for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
Part of author Antonucci’s research involved decoding Mark Twain’s writings to separate out fact from fiction and exaggeration. Mark Twain’s "Roughing It" was creative nonfiction that contained exaggeration, outright fabrications and misstatements of fact. Correctly interpreting the portion of the text pertaining to Lake Tahoe required critical evaluation through the lenses of geology, limnology, physics, geography, astronomy, biology, semantics, deductive reasoning, and, of course, the natural and cultural histories of Lake Tahoe.