Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Before Mark Twain was famous, he was a boy in a river town who wanted one thing: to work on a steamboat. This book tells how he became a cub pilot and learned the great Mississippi River by heart, every bend, reef, and crossing, under a tough teacher named Bixby. Later, as a famous writer, he rides the river again and finds it changed. It is funny, warm, and full of river lore.
Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi, where the arrival of a steamboat was the day's great event and every boy dreamed of river work. Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, grew partly from articles he had written about his pilot training, and it became his fullest account of the river that made him a writer.
The early chapters give the river's history, from De Soto and La Salle to the steamboat age. Then comes the famous training sequence: young Sam Clemens ships as a cub under Mr Bixby, who makes him learn the river's shape by day and night, its marks, crossings, and snags, until the twelve hundred miles between St Louis and New Orleans live in his memory like a book he can read in the dark.
In the later chapters Twain returns as a passenger after the Civil War and finds railroads, new towns, and a tamer river, and the memoir turns reflective without losing its jokes. Pilots' rivalries, races, wrecks, and river characters crowd the pages. It is the essential Twain book between the novels, and the river is its true hero.
Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in Missouri, learned the Mississippi as a steamboat pilot's apprentice, and took his pen name from the leadsman's cry. Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, joins his memoir of that training under the pilot Bixby to the river's history, lore, and a return journey down the changed river of his later years. It offers the book where Twain's America, funny and elegiac, runs deepest.
Life on the Mississippi was published in 1883. Its opening chapters are a compact history of the river itself: its mud, its shifting course, its first sighting by Europeans in 1542, and the claims of La Salle, before Twain states his subject plainly: the river is well worth reading about, and he intends to read it closely.
The middle of the book is the pilot memoir, expanded from his Old Times articles: the cub's apprenticeship under Bixby, the pilots' association, races and wrecks, and chapters of sharp schooling at the wheel. The closing movement takes Twain back downriver as a passenger years later, revisiting towns, hearing river gossip, and measuring the steamboat world he knew against the railroad age replacing it.
Chapter headings in this edition keep Twain's own comic summaries, and they are a fair guide to the mixture: statistics beside tall tales, instruction beside elegy. Read the training chapters first if time is short; they are among the best things he ever wrote.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 245.
The first chapter
BUT the basin of the Mississippi is the Body of The Nation. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths; the Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third; the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. It would contain austria four times, germany or spain five times, france six times, the british islands or italy ten times._ Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.
EDITOR'S TABLE, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1883. Author died 1910. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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