During Mark Twin’s lifetime (1835–1910), steamboating on the Mississippi passed into history and legend along with the overland stage, the Pony Express, and the Western frontier. He outlasted all of them to become their chronicler and living symbol.

The mighty river itself—the young Sam Clemens claimed to have known stretches of it as well as he knew the hallway of his own house in the dark—was familiar no longer. He recognized this soon after he began his trip downriver from St. Louis: the Mississippi was “as brand-new as if it had been built yesterday.” All that remained of his meticulously acquired knowledge of the river was a landsman’s skill in remembering names and addresses. He saw new islands, new landings, new towns taking the place of once-thriving settlements now landlocked. At the St. Louis levee, in his piloting days packed solid with steamboats, he found only half a dozen, their fires banked or dead. Tied up inside the wooded mouth of a tributary, the Obion River, he saw a lone steamboat. “The spyglass revealed the fact that she was named for me—or he was named for me, whichever you prefer.” Even this tribute to his fame did not relieve the feeling of strangeness and desolation—he saw no other steamboat that day.

Along with the departed glories of steamboating, there was a larger gamut of change that Mark Twin memorialized in Life on the Mississippi. The Civil War had closed the river to commercial traffic and destroyed the pilot’s occupation. To Mark Twain’s understanding, the war also destroyed something precious, redeeming, and innocent in American life. Moralist and social critic, he noted in its stead the hardness, cynicism, lust for money, and epidemic political corruption that shaped what he called the Gilded Age, “An era of incredible rottenness.”

His friend and literary confidant William Dean Howells called him “the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. . . . No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery.” He married into an abolitionist family, and his next-door neighbor in liberal-minded Hartford was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that awakened the nation’s conscience to the sin of slavery. And so in middle age, he returned to his native region with conflicting emotions: nostalgia and hostility, affection and outrage. Even before leaving on his trip South in 1882, he had begun to tell himself what he expected to find: a region barren of progress, he wrote in his notebook, expert only in the arts of war, murder, and massacre, given to “flowery and gushy” speech and pretentious architecture. For all its vaunted graciousness and refinement, the culture of the antebellum South, he said, had been an anachronism borrowed from the novels of Sit Walter Scott. It was “a pathetic sham,” like “The House Beautiful” (Chapter XXXVIII): the town or village’s finest dwelling, a two-story frame building fronted with fluted columns and Corinthian capitals made of pine painted white to look like marble and evoke the bygone glory of Greece, a civilization and economy, like that of the prewar Cotton Kingdom, founded on human bondage. “In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere. They date from it,” he writes. “All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or duin’ the waw . . . ‘Bless yo’ heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo’ de waw!’ ” The Old South still hadn’t grown up.

Mark Twain’s acerb, profoundly felt, and hilarious chronicle of old times and present times on the Mississippi is social history and personal history, an alloy of anecdote, statistics, and river lore, true story, tall story, and dubious story, including the unverifiable claim that he borrowed his pseudonym from Captain Isaiah Sellers, the supposed Methuselah of the piloting profession. Like The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, earlier books that had established Mark Twain’s reputation, Life on the Mississippi is the work of a brilliant travel writer and incomparable humorist. It is also a fable about the education of a literary artist as well as a pilot and the roles of imagination, memory, training, and intuition.

 

Mark Twain had been planning the book that became Life on the Mississippi for nearly two decades before he published it in 1883. In January 1866, a few months after he announced to his family that he had had “a ‘call’ to literature”—“to excite the laughter of God’s creatures”—he planned to write a book about the Mississippi.