Life on the Mississippi

About the book

Twain looks back on the ambition to become a steamboat pilot and on the exacting education required to read a river that never remains still. Channels, landmarks, currents, and the habits of other pilots become part of a professional language that transforms the scenery's meaning. The book also records a later journey along the Mississippi, bringing recollection into contact with altered towns, technologies, and river life. Anecdotes, local histories, tall tales, and sharp observations interrupt any simple progress from one place to another. Twain's humour is inseparable from an interest in what experience teaches and what nostalgia conceals. The result is a deliberately varied work about skilled labour, regional memory, and a landscape that serves simultaneously as route, workplace, and source of stories.

• Work and expertise
• Memory and change
• River life

Why read it

For the pleasure of watching a landscape become legible through a pilot's demanding craft.

English text