Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Afterword
Bibliography
CHAPTER I - The River and Its History
CHAPTER II - The River and Its Explorers
CHAPTER III - Frescoes from the Past
CHAPTER IV - The Boys’ Ambition
CHAPTER V - I Want to Be a Cub Pilot
CHAPTER VI - A Cub Pilot’s Experience
CHAPTER VII - A Daring Deed
CHAPTER VIII - Perplexing Lessons
CHAPTER IX - Continued Perplexities
CHAPTER X - Completing My Education
CHAPTER XI - The River Rises
CHAPTER XII - Sounding
CHAPTER XIII - A Pilot’s Needs
CHAPTER XIV - Rank and Dignity of Piloting
CHAPTER XV - The Pilots’ Monopoly
CHAPTER XVI - Racing Days
CHAPTER XVII - Cutoffs and Stephen
CHAPTER XVIII - I Take a Few Extra Lessons
CHAPTER XIX - Brown and I Exchange Compliments
CHAPTER XX - A Catastrophe
CHAPTER XXI - A Section in My Biography
CHAPTER XXII - I Return to My Muttons
CHAPTER XXIII - Traveling Incognito
CHAPTER XXIV - My Incognito Is Exploded
CHAPTER XXV - From Cairo to Hickman
CHAPTER XXVI - Under Fire
CHAPTER XXVII - Some Imported Articles
CHAPTER XXVIII - Uncle Mumford Unloads
CHAPTER XXIX - A Few Specimen Bricks
CHAPTER XXX - Sketches by the Way
CHAPTER XXXI - A Thumbprint and What Came of It
CHAPTER XXXII - The Disposal of a Bonanza
CHAPTER XXXIII - Refreshments and Ethics
CHAPTER XXXIV - Tough Yarns
CHAPTER XXXV - Vicksburg During the Trouble
CHAPTER XXXVI - The Professor’s Yarn
CHAPTER XXXVII - The End of the Gold Dust
CHAPTER XXXVIII - The House Beautiful
CHAPTER XXXIX - Manufactures and Miscreants
CHAPTER XL - Castles and Culture
CHAPTER XLI - The Metropolis of the South
CHAPTER XLII - Hygiene and Sentiment
CHAPTER XLIII - The Art of Inhumation
CHAPTER XLIV - City Sights
CHAPTER XLV - Southern Sports
CHAPTER XLVI - Enchantments and Enchanters
CHAPTER XLVII - Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable
CHAPTER XLVIII - Sugar and Postage
CHAPTER XLIX - Episodes in Pilot Life
CHAPTER L - The “Original Jacobs”
CHAPTER LI - Reminiscences
CHAPTER LII - A Burning Brand
CHAPTER LIII - My Boyhood’s Home
CHAPTER LIV - Past and Present
CHAPTER LV - A Vendetta and Other Things
CHAPTER LVI - A Question of Law
CHAPTER LVII - An Archangel
CHAPTER LVIII - On the Upper River
CHAPTER LIX - Legends and Scenery
CHAPTER LX - Speculations and Conclusions
APPENDIX
In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835–1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”
Justin Kaplan is the author of numerous books, including Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mark Twain and His World; Walt Whitman: A Life; and with his wife, Anne Bernays, Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York. In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
John Seelye is a leading American Studies scholar and Graduate Research Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of Florida. His books include The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation with Pictures, and Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republic Plan, 1755–1825.
SIGNET CLASSICS
Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin