Life on the Mississippi

Before he was a writer, Samuel Clemens learned to pilot steamboats on the Mississippi, and the first half of this book tells how a cocky young cub was taught by the pilot Horace Bixby to read every bend, snag and shallow of twelve hundred miles of river. In the second half he returns in 1882, after the Civil War and the railways have changed everything, and travels the river again.

The book even explains his pen name: 'mark twain' was the leadsman's call for two fathoms of water, safe depth for a boat. It is the best background to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and a portrait of a world that disappeared within one man's lifetime.

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.