Product Description
Part travel book, part autobiography, and part social commentary, Life on the Mississippi is a memoir of the cub pilot's apprenticeship, a record of Twain's return to the river and to Hannibal as an adult, a meditation on the harsh vagaries of nature, and a study of the varied and sometimes violent activities engaged in by those who live on the river's shores. As Willie Morris notes in his introduction, it "is written with the flamboyance and affecting precision of a craftsman." Life on the Mississippi explores how a child learns to be an adult, and how an adult learns to understand what it was to be a child. It is a book about the South, about memory, about change, and, of course, about the Mississippi River and the world through which it snakes. "When the life of the river is rendered with Twain's brand of wry skepticism," writes Lawrence Howe in his afterword, "the Mississippi is, indeed, well worth reading about."
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War by Mark Twain, published in 1883. The book begins with a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541. Chapters 4-22 describe Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from railroads had made steamboats passe, in spite of improvements in navigation and boat construction. Twain sees new, large cities on the river, and records his observations on greed, gullibility, tragedy, and bad architecture.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews