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:
