Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In a drowsing white town on the west bank of the Mississippi, a boy waits for the cry that turns a dead morning glorious: "S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!" For young Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, there was only one permanent ambition — to be a steamboatman. This is the true story of how he ran away to the river, talked a master pilot into teaching him, and learned to carry twelve hundred miles of treacherous water in his head.

Half memoir, half hymn to a vanished world, Life on the Mississippi takes you into the gilded pilot-house, out onto the black river at midnight, and through the merciless apprenticeship under the great pilot Mr. Bixby, who taught his "cub" that the face of the water is a wonderful book — one that must be read with absolute certainty, or it will tear the life out of the strongest vessel afloat. It is also the story of what such mastery costs: how, once he could read every reef and shadow, all the grace and poetry went out of the majestic river.

First published in 1883, it endures because Mark Twain wrote it from the inside, out of his own years on the water — funny, exact, and quietly heartbroken for an America the railroads were already sweeping away. No one has ever made the Mississippi feel so alive.

Before the journey begins, step aboard. On the pages that follow you will meet the men of the river and the great stream itself, and travel its course from St. Louis down to New Orleans. Then cast off.