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Look Inside | Reading Guide
Reading Guide
May 29, 2007 | ISBN 9780375759376 Buy
Oct 01, 1983 | ISBN 9780553213492 Buy *This format is not eligible to earn points towards the Reader Rewards program
May 29, 2007 | ISBN 9780553904000 Buy
Oct 31, 2000 | ISBN 9780679642046 Buy
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May 29, 2007 | ISBN 9780375759376
Oct 01, 1983 | ISBN 9780553213492
May 29, 2007 | ISBN 9780553904000
Oct 31, 2000 | ISBN 9780679642046
Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write.Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.
‘I am a person who would quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting,’ Mark Twain once remarked. ‘I would rather sink a steamboat than eat, any time.’ And in 1882, Twain did just that: he returned to the river of his youth as a mature writer determined to expand seven articles which he had serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in 1875 into the definitive travelogue on the great Mississippi. Although Life on the Mississippi was not commercially successful when first published in May 1883, it is the work that Twain later claimed was the favorite among his books. Twain’s rich portrait of the Mississippi also marks a distinctive transition in the life of the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed. Yet it is infused with the irreverent humor that was his trademark. ‘Mark Twain was the first writer who ever used the American vernacular at the level of art,’ said Bernard de Voto. ‘He had a greater effect than any other writer on the evolution of American prose.’
MARK TWAIN, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks… More about Mark Twain
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