He was the Lincoln of American literature.”Ĭlemens was a steamboat pilot from 1857 until the civil war closed the Mississippi in 1861. As his most recent biographer, Ron Powers, has put it: “Twain’s way of seeing and hearing things changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things. Alongside The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), this tour de force of unreliable reportage, spliced with travel, history and memoir, provides a deep insight into Huckleberry Finn as well as a key to its author and his outrageous originality. Life on the Mississippi is not just the brilliant sketch that precedes the vaster and more colourful canvas of a celebrated novel, it expresses the heart and soul of Samuel Clemens, the alter ego of Mark Twain. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.” “When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life now and then we had the hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
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