Life on the Mississippi

Summary

Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing. Chapters 4 to 20 are the heart of the book, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875 as Old Times on the Mississippi. Twain recalls that every boy in his Missouri village wanted to be a steamboatman, runs away to the river, and persuades the pilot Horace Bixby to teach him the twelve hundred miles from St. Louis to New Orleans for five hundred dollars. The cub learns that he must memorize every point, bar, and crossing upstream and down, by day and night, and that the river keeps changing its shape. He learns to read the face of the water like a book and discovers that the knowledge costs him its beauty. He describes the pilot as the most independent person on earth, the pilots' association that beat the captains, steamboat races, and the river's habit of cutting through its own bends. The section ends darkly: the tyrannical pilot Brown strikes Twain's younger brother Henry, a clerk on the Pennsylvania, Twain knocks Brown down with a stool and leaves the boat, and days later the Pennsylvania's boilers explode below Memphis. Henry is fatally scalded, and Twain sits six days by him in a Memphis hall turned hospital. After a brief chapter on getting his license and the coming of war, the second half follows Twain's return twenty-one years later, travelling under a false name that is soon discovered. He goes down from St. Louis to New Orleans and back up to St. Paul, talking with the mate Uncle Mumford, finding his old landmarks gone, and recording changes: railroads, snag boats, electric lights, government engineers, and towns grown or vanished. He visits Vicksburg's siege caves, hears a dying German's revenge story, mourns the pilot of the Gold Dust after its boiler explosion, tours New Orleans cemeteries and Mardi Gras, meets George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, blames Sir Walter Scott's romances for the South's sham chivalry, revisits Hannibal, and closes among the booming towns of the upper river. James R. Osgood of Boston published the book in 1883, with Chatto and Windus in London.

Top Lessons

• Knowledge has a price

  Once the cub has mastered the language of the water, a glorious sunset becomes a list of warnings about wind, snags, and shoals. Twain says that he gained a valuable trade and lost the river's poetry, and he compares himself with a doctor who can no longer see a beautiful face without reading the signs of disease. Expertise changes how we see.

• Apprenticeship and humility

  The cub begins proud of having a new career and is repeatedly humbled: he forgets every point Bixby named, panics at a shoal call, and learns that the river at night is a different river. Bixby's teaching is harsh but effective, and Twain's comic self-portrait shows that mastery comes only through long, humbling practice.

• Grief told plainly

  After chapters of comedy Twain tells of Henry's death in short, controlled sentences: the extra that says he is not hurt, the later extra that says he is hurt beyond help, the six days in the Memphis hall, and the move to the death-room. The restraint makes the sorrow stronger and shows how an honest writer handles personal loss.

• A changing river, a changing country

  Returning after twenty-one years, Twain finds the old packets gone, railroads and towboats in their place, his landmarks washed away, and new cities rising upriver. The second half of the book is a record of how fast America changed after the Civil War, and of how memory measures that change.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Life on the Mississippi is not a medical book, but it holds several valuable records for the history of medicine. Chapter 20 is an eyewitness account of mass-casualty care after the 1858 boiler explosion of the Pennsylvania: forty scalded men laid on pallets in a Memphis public hall, faces wrapped in raw cotton and linseed oil, physicians and medical students standing watches, the women of the city nursing, and the practice of carrying the dying to a separate death-room to protect the morale of the others. The burned chief mate refuses morphine, which he blames for his wife's death, and suspects the doctors of hiding it in his medicines and water; he goes without water for two days rather than risk it. Henry Clemens, at first reported unhurt, dies on the sixth day after scalding injuries that the physicians judged fatal on arrival, and his wandering mind and picking at the coverlet are the classic signs of terminal delirium. The 1882 chapters turn to public health: Memphis's new sewer system after the yellow-fever epidemic that emptied the city, with a German traveller's description of the plague year; New Orleans's above-ground cemeteries, a physician's report on burial and epidemics, and an undertaker who looks forward to epidemics for business; and the chills and fever of Hannibal. Chapter 9's comparison of the pilot and the doctor, who can no longer see beauty without reading disease, is a striking reflection on the clinical gaze. Twain's account of his own boyhood terrors of conscience in Chapter 54 may also interest readers of scrupulosity, as a reading rather than a diagnosis.

• Chapter 9

  Twain says that since learning to read the river he has pitied doctors, who may see in a lovely flush only the sign of hidden disease.

• Chapter 20

  The Pennsylvania's boilers explode; scalded passengers and crew wait on a wood-flat in the sun without food or help until carried to Memphis.

• Chapter 20

  The Memphis hall used as a hospital: wounded wrapped in raw cotton and linseed oil, physicians and medical students on watch, women of the city as nurses, and the death-room for the dying.

• Chapter 20

  The delirious chief mate refuses morphine, which he blames for his wife's death, and survives three trips to the death-room.

• Chapter 20

  Henry Clemens's last six days under Dr. Peyton's care, ending with his wandering mind and fingers picking at the coverlet.

• Chapter 29

  Memphis's sewer system as the lesson of the yellow-fever epidemic, with Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg's description of the deserted, dying city.

• Chapters 42-43

  New Orleans cemeteries, a report on burial and epidemic mortality, and an undertaker's frank view that epidemics are good for trade.