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Sign up todayLife on the Mississippi
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Learn moreThe Mississippi River, known as “America’s river,” and Mark Twain are practically synonymous in American culture. The popularity of Twain’s steamboat and steamboat pilot on the ever-changing Mississippi has endured for over a century.
A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it.
Samuel Clemens became a licensed river pilot at the age of twenty-four under the apprenticeship of Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones. His name, Mark Twain, was derived from the river pilot term describing safe navigating conditions, or “mark two fathoms.” This term was shortened to “mark twain” by the leadsmen whose job it was to monitor the water’s depth and report it to the pilot.
Although Mark Twain used his childhood experiences growing up along the Mississippi in numerous works, nowhere is the river and the pilot’s life more thoroughly described than in Life on the Mississippi.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Mark Twain spent his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, which forms the setting for his two greatest works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Trying his hand at printing, typesetting and then gold-mining, the former steam-boat pilot eventually found his calling in journalism and travel writing. Dubbed 'the father of American literature' by William Faulkner, Twain died in 1910 after a colourful life of travelling, bankruptcy and great literary success.
Grover Gardner, a professional actor, director, and teacher, has narrated over 650 audiobooks. He was named one of the Best Voices of the Century by AudioFile magazine as well as a Golden Voice, and he has received over twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards. He has also won two coveted Audie Awards, as well as being a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly named him Audiobook Narrator of the Year.
Reviews
“Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.”
“I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life…than any other American…I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the royal blood.”
“Listeners who enjoyed Grover Gardner’s narrations of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer will savor this journey…Gardner’s easy familiarity with Twain’s style is evident once more: He captures all of the author’s wit and wordplay as well as his colorful descriptions of the era just before the Civil War. Gardner gives some rollicking performances as he brings to life the book’s memorable characters, with their gruff voices and varied accents. The text can be as meandering as the river itself, but Gardner’s first-rate narration keeps the listener on course.”
“There are at least half a dozen audiobook versions of Mark Twain’s greatest work of nonfiction, his account of his time on the Mississippi River as a riverboat apprentice and pilot, and, later, as a witness to change. Veteran narrator Grover Gardner, with his fine exuberant voice, comic pacing and sense of mordant irony, gives us the very best rendition. The book begins with its constant theme—the Mississippi’s lawless ways, its mobility and perversity—and goes on to its “discovery” by Europeans, paying caustic attention to the invaders’ appetite for other people’s land. From then on, the book rambles through Twain’s often chastening experiences, the rise and decline of steamship riverboating, and the manners, mores and eccentricities of river towns and people. Above all, this is a book about travel. Setting out as a young man, a high-spirited Sam Clemens feels the exhilaration of every traveler: ‘I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler!…and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.’”
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