NEW YORK -- Mark Twain may be best-known as the creator of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but he was also a well-known travel writer in his day, writing five books of commentary and tall tales about life around the country and the world.

Two new editions of Twain's travel writings are being published this fall. "Following the Equator" is being reissued in its entirety this month by National Geographic as part of its Adventure Classic Series. The book ($14) is an account of Twain's journeys during an around-the-world lecture tour. He circled the globe by steamship, train, and rickshaw, from Paris to Vancouver and on to the South Seas, Australia, India and South Africa.

"Mark Twain on Travel" ($24.95), due out in November from The Lyons Press, includes excerpts from "Life on the Mississippi," "Roughing It," "Following the Equator," "Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad."

In "Innocents Abroad," Twain followed a group of Americans on a religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land. "Roughing It" describes Twain's misadventures in Western mining camps, while "Life on the Mississippi" brought him back to the region of his boyhood. And in "A Tramp Abroad," Twain wittily contrasted his Yankee provincialism against the high culture of Europe.

For example, his effort to appreciate Wagnerian opera in Germany included the observation that "our nation will like the opera too, by and by ... one in 50 of those who attend our operas likes it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other 49 go in order to learn to like it, and the rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it. The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung, so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been to operas before.

"The funerals of these," Twain adds, "do not occur often enough."