When Arthur Rothstein took this photo in 1940, the once prosperous mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, was almost a ghost town. It's a bit more lively today and attracts lots of tourists, but the drive there from Carson City still feels like a trip to the middle of nowhere, with rugged hills and mountains stretching far into the distance on all sides.
Near the height of its glory, when Samuel L. Clemens was writing for the local Territorial Enterprise, the town was full of colorful--and often dangerous--characters, and life was never dull. But it was still in the middle of nowhere, and that's worth keeping in mind when recalling that this was the unlikely birthplace of the most famous literary career in American history. It was early in 1863 that the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise began publishing articles by Sam Clemens under his new pseudonym of Mark Twain.
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