Local author Roy Morris Jr.’s sixth book, Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, hits bookstores today.

The book, whose title comes from Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, concerns the six years that the beloved author and humorist spent traveling the West during and immediately after the Civil War—years in which he discovered his true calling as a writer and invented his famous pen name while working as a reporter on the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise.

Mr. Morris, himself a former newspaper reporter at the Chattanooga Times and the Chattanooga News-Free Press, follows Twain (or Samuel Clemens, as he was then called) from his brief, inglorious service as a Confederate guerrilla in Missouri at the beginning of the Civil War to his three-week stagecoach trip across the western plains to Nevada Territory. Along the way, Twain encountered hostile Indians, dangerous gunslingers and even Mormon leader Brigham Young. Once in Nevada, Twain tried with spectacular unsuccess to strike it rich as a gold and silver miner—one day he burned down a mountain with a frying pan—before taking a job as reporter on the Territorial Enterprise.

For the next two years, Twain honed his craft as a writer, reporting on events in the boomtown of Virginia City, at the epicenter of the fabulous Comstock Lode silver strike. In Virginia City, which he called “the livest town that America ever produced,” Twain mingled daily with miners, gamblers, gunslingers, Indians and dance hall girls. Once, he invented a sensational article about the massacre of a local family, only to publish a brief retraction the next day after readers pointed out that the family was still alive. “I take it all back,” Twain wrote.

Twain left Virginia City in 1864 to avoid having to fight a duel with a rival newspaper editor. He went to San Francisco, which he described as “heaven on the half shell,” and took a job on the San Francisco Morning Call. During that period, he wrote his first famous short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” In early 1866, he spent four months touring Hawaii, where he tried surfing, eyed hula dancers, visited the site of Captain James Cook’s death at the hand of native islanders, and hiked across the floor of an active volcano.

In October 1866, Twain gave his first public lecture, “Our Fellow Savages in the Sandwich Islands,” at the San Francisco Academy of Music. It was a huge success. “From that day to this,” he said, “I have always been able to gain my living without doing any work.” By the time Twain returned to the East Coast in December 1866, he had successfully transformed himself from Samuel Clemens, out-of-work riverboat pilot, Confederate deserter and unsuccessful miner, into Mark Twain, celebrated author, humorist and stage performer. The trouble, as he promised, had begun.

Mr. Morris, the editor of Military Heritage magazine, has published five previous books on the Civil War and post-Civil War eras, including Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan; Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company; The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War; Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876; and The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America.

He resides in North Chattanooga with his wife, Leslie, the director of Northside Learning Center. Their son, Phil, is a 2009 graduate of UTC, and daughter Lucy (GPS, ’09) attends the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Lighting Out for the Territory is published by Simon and Schuster. It is available at Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million and online at Amazon.com.