Life on the Mississippi (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Mark Twain
- First Published: 1883
- Type of Work: Travel literature
- Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Travel writing
- Subjects: United States or Americans, South or Southerners, Authors or writers, Nineteenth century, Novelists, Wit or humor, Rivers or waterways, Nostalgia, Navigation
Life on the Mississippi is Twain's happiest book. Written early in his career, before the difficulties of his personal life had a chance to color his perception, and filled with reminiscent celebration of his time as a boy and man, as an apprentice and as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, it is a lively, affectionate tribute hardly muted by the fact that the world of the romantic pilots of the Mississippi had disappeared forever during the Civil War and the development of the railroads.
It is a great grab-bag of a book. It starts formally enough, with a sonorous history of...
[The entire page is 1121 words long]
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