The Guardian's 100 Best Nonfiction Books: No 56 – 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain (1883)

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers his pick of Mark Twain’s Life On the Mississippi for number 56 in the 100 best nonfiction books.

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.”

Here is the unmistakable voice of America’s greatest and most original, prose writer describing the childhood that would inspire his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Mark Twain (for it is he) goes on:

“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. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”

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. 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. 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. He was the Lincoln of American literature.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/27/100-best-nonfiction-books-56-life-on-the-mississippi-mark-twain 

Life On The Mississippi: The American Queen Steamboat Will Transport You Back To The Time Of Mark Twain

Mark Twain is one of my favorite writers. I love his novels, especially The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I love even more his memoirs and semi-autobiographical books, like Roughing It, and Life On The Mississippi. 

When I was a Defense Department administrative officer some years ago I attended a public affairs conference in Memphis, Tennessee. The week-long conference was interesting and the nightlife was even more so.

I enjoyed Memphis' music and bar scene on historic Beale Street every night. I passed on visiting Elvis Presley's Graceland, but I was thrilled to have visited a Steamboat-restaurant docked on the Mississippi River.

I enjoyed the fine southern cooking and while I ate and drank I felt as if I went back into time. I half-expected ole Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, to walk into the dinning room, attired in his customary white suit with his ever-present cigar in his hand. I only wished that he had, and I wished that the steamboat had left the dock and headed on down the river.

Now, according to Lynn Houghon at the British newspaper the Daily Mail, one can go back to that era and cruise the Mississippi by boarding a steamboat called the American Queen. 

Straightening my black fishnet stockings and smoothing the ribbons on my red taffeta dress, I peer from behind the thick velvet curtains skirting the proscenium of the Grand Saloon.

Flickering gas lamps are enveloped in smoke that curls up from fat, hand-rolled Cuban cigars. 

Ladies dressed in lace and finery sip mint juleps and fan themselves. On stage, the banjo picker strums Civil War ballads. None of this is happening, but imaginations run wild on a voyage up the Mississippi River.

This trip, on the six-deck American Queen, departs from New Orleans and ends in Memphis, Tennessee.

Several of the 436 passengers are aficionados of steamboating. 'All the boys in my hometown in Missouri had one ambition: to be steamboat men,' says Mark Twain. 

This Mark Twain is an actor, who gives two well-received performances.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip via the below link: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3166235/All-hail-American-Queen-Step-steamboat-transport-time-Mark-Twain-costume.html

Happy Birthday To Mark Twain

As Biography.com notes, today is Mark Twain's birthday.

Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel L. Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain and went on to pen several novels, including two major classics of American literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor. Twain died on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/mark-twain-9512564?et_cid=57455388&et_rid=704027439&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.biography.com%2fpeople%2fmark-twain-9512564 

Note: You can also read my old South Philadelphia American column on visiting Mark Twain's house in Hartford via the below link:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/MarkTwainHartford.jpg

A Look Back At Mark Twain's Life On The Mississippi

Steve King at the web site www.todayinliterature.com notes that on this day in 1883 Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was published.

Much of the book had been printed as a series of articles in The Atlantic eight years earlier. These reminiscences had been popular -- they "made the ice-water in my pitcher turn muddy," said William Dean Howells -- and Twain decided to expand them, seeing an opportunity to bring another high-volume subscription book to market. Because he would need to gather research, he also saw an opportunity to revisit the world of his youth after twenty-one years away, "to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left."

In his autobiography Twain says that his career as a river-boat pilot began in the mid-1850s: "I made up my mind that I would go to the head-waters of the Amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune.... When I got to New Orleans I inquired about ships leaving for Para and discovered that there weren't any and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that century." He signed on as an apprentice with Horace Bixby, the pilot who had brought him to New Orleans; on the nostalgia and research trip of 1882, Twain arranged to travel upriver with Bixby. The riverbank was so different that when given a chance to pilot his old route Twain couldn't find any of his remembered landmarks. As a boy he would see a dozen steamboats an hour; now there were maybe a half-dozen a day -- one day he saw only one, though it was called "The Mark Twain." The end of his trip was a three-day stay in hometown Hannibal, Missouri; here he reports bursting into tears because of the changes, because of the familiar look and smell of the mud, because he was no longer Sam Clemens but Mark Twain, the famous author who now traveled with a secretary hired to take down notes so that no profitable impression might be lost.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/12/2013