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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…
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.
Context and significance
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.
About the author
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.