Life on the Mississippi
Twain returns to the river of his youth, first as an apprentice pilot and then as a passenger on a steamboat heading south. The early chapters are the best thing he wrote about learning a trade: the river as a text that has to be read, and the moment when knowledge destroys the scenery.
The later chapters were added to fill out the book and are more uneven, mixing memoir, history and tall tales. The account of piloting is worth the whole volume. It also explains why Mark Twain's sentences sound the way they do: he learned to write by learning to steer.
Public-domain status
First published in 1883. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Mark Twain died in 1910, so this work has been free to republish there since 1981.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 245 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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