Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Life on the Mississippi
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The opening of Chapter I
THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.
The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter I, in which the river is measured and found remarkable: four thousand three hundred miles with the Missouri counted as its main branch, crooked enough to spend thirteen hundred miles covering six hundred and seventy-five, drawing its water from twenty-eight states, then narrowing and deepening toward its mouth, and rising fifty feet at Natchez but only fifteen at New Orleans.
Download Full EPUB1883
Memoir
148,000 words
8.2 h
Standalone
The Mississippi from St. Louis and Hannibal down to New Orleans, and the 1882 voyage back up to St. Paul, with most of it seen from a pilot-house.
Sixty chapters and an appendix, in twelve parts
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.44 MB (EPUB) · 0.71 MB (AZW3) · 0.50 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #245
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s account of the river he learned as a young man and came back to twenty-one years later. The first part is an apprenticeship: how a boy from Hannibal talked his way into a pilot-house, what Horace Bixby demanded of him, and what it cost him to learn twelve hundred miles of shifting water by heart. The second part is the voyage of 1882, when he went down to New Orleans and up to St. Paul and found the river changed, the steamboats gone and the towns different. The book mixes reporting with stories it plainly enjoys telling.
The chapters are short and the book is full of set pieces: a note-book of soundings, the face of the water that changes from a picture into a page of warnings, a race between two steamers, the explosion of the Pennsylvania and the death of the author’s brother, and later the vanished town of Napoleon and the cemeteries of New Orleans. The Wikipedia article on the book covers its composition and its place between his travel books and his novels. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #245.
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: Summary, People & Places
This page offers a summary and analysis of Life on the Mississippi, with the sixty chapters described in twelve groups of five, the people and places that recur, and the questions the book keeps raising about how much of it is report and how much is performance. Mark Twain published it in 1883, and it came out of two visits to the river twenty-one years apart. The text opens with an editorial from Harper’s Magazine of February 1863 calling the Mississippi basin the body of the nation, and then begins the memoir proper, with a river that is worth reading about. The page follows the book’s own order rather than rearranging it by subject, so the apprenticeship and the return keep the shape, and the long gap, that they have in the text.
The first twenty chapters are the apprenticeship. A boy in a town on the west bank wants nothing but to be a steamboatman, runs away to St. Louis, and fails at it; then, aboard an old tub called the Paul Jones, he talks a pilot named Horace Bixby into teaching him the river for five hundred dollars out of his first wages. What follows is the most detailed account anywhere in Twain of what piloting actually required: the shape of the banks remembered in the dark, the crossings and shoal marks, the soundings cried by the leadsman, the rise that opens chutes behind the bars. The lesson ends with the passage about the sunset he could no longer see as a sunset. By then he has filled a note-book that bristles with the names of towns, points, bars and bends, with a four-hour gap in it for every watch he slept through, and has begun to suspect that piloting is a trade rather than a romance.
Between the lessons the book opens out into the trade. Pilots are the aristocrats of the river, paid as much as two hundred and fifty dollars a month and treated accordingly; they form a benevolent association that corners the business with a mail-bag lock and a secret way of holding the key; two boats race and the whole valley talks of nothing else. A pilot named Brown bullies the cub until the cub knocks him down with a stool and expects the penitentiary; the captain, hearing of it, says he is glad and offers to pay for a second beating ashore. Then the Pennsylvania blows up below Memphis, and the narrator sits six days and nights in a hall of wounded men while his brother dies. The war ends the trade, and a short chapter lists the jobs he took instead.
The rest of the book is the return. In April 1882 he goes back with a poet and a stenographer, travelling under false names that last about six hours, and works his way down from St. Louis to New Orleans and then up again to St. Paul. The river has moved: St. Genevieve is behind a new tow-head, Vicksburg has been cut off from the main channel, Napoleon, Arkansas, has been carried away entirely. The towns are full of railways, ice factories and electric light; the pilots are employees now. New Orleans gives him the cemeteries, the French quarter and Mardi Gras, and Hannibal gives him the hill above the town and the boys he grew up with. At Vicksburg he is shown the caves dug into the clay during the siege, and at Baton Rouge he blames Sir Walter Scott for the castle on the hill.
The book is not a plain record. Twain says himself that steamboatmen used to load strangers with lies and save the facts for friends, and the best stories here are offered as stories, from a dying man’s narrative in Munich to a convict’s letter that is exposed as a fraud. The Appendix is documents rather than narrative: the relief-boat letters from the flood of 1882, the case for the Mississippi River Commission, and an Indian tale from Schoolcraft. Readers who want the novel that grew out of these years can take Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a chapter of which is quoted in Chapter III; the earlier travel book is The Innocents Abroad. The complete text is at Project Gutenberg #245, and the rest of the shelf is Classic Fiction.
Historical Context
The river the book remembers was the country’s main highway. Before the railroads, freight and passengers went by water, and the pilot, who alone knew where the channel ran that week, was the best-paid man on the boat. Twain learned the trade between 1857 and 1861, when the Mississippi was still crowded with packets, coal fleets and lumber rafts, and he was in the rebel army in 1861 when the war put an end to it: commerce was suspended, the trade was gone, and he went west. Twenty-one years of mining, reporting and lecturing separate the two parts of the book, and the return of 1882 is written by a man who has been away long enough to be a stranger.
The river he came back to was being reorganised by the government. The flood of 1882 put the lowlands under water from Cairo to the mouth, broke the levees in many places and left the Mississippi seventy miles wide in some reaches; the book quotes the relief-boat dispatches in its Appendix. A Mississippi River Commission was at work, its engineers building wing-dams and revetments while Captain Eads’s jetties at the mouth were holding open a channel. Snag-boats pulled the river’s teeth, the crossings were lit with lamps, and Bixby and Ritchie had charted the channel and patented a lamp to go with the chart. Railroads had taken the through trade, and the wharves were empty.
The book also belongs to a shelf of travel writing about the valley. Twain quotes Captain Basil Hall, Mrs. Trollope, Captain Marryat, Charles Augustus Murray and Alexander Mackay, all of whom came out from England, took notes and went home to publish, and he enjoys measuring their emotions against the river he knows. Behind the tall tales stands the southwestern humour he had grown up with, where the point of a story is the telling rather than the fact. By 1883 the steamboat age was already a memory worth preserving, and the memoir was written by a man who had been working for five or six years on a novel about a runaway boy and a raft, a chapter of which he printed here.
People & Places
- The Mississippi: Not a setting but an actor: a river that cuts through necks of land, moves bodily sideways, carries towns into the woods and builds islands in a night. Its channel shifts every season, and the pilot’s whole art is knowing it as it was an hour ago. Twain gives it mud, depth, width and a face that reads like print.
- Horace Bixby: The pilot who takes the cub on and makes a pilot of him, by ridicule and a demand for exact knowledge. He finds Jones’s plantation on a night when nothing can be seen, tells his pupil to learn the shape of the river and not the look of it, and later commands the City of Baton Rouge. In the war he was head pilot of the Union fleet at Memphis.
- The cub pilot: The young narrator, with a note-book full of names and none of them in his head. He is frightened, proud, and slow to understand that the river must be learned twice over, once by daylight and once in the dark. He is also the man who loses the poetry of the river by learning to read it.
- Hannibal: The village on the west bank where the book begins and ends, with its empty streets, its wharf and its boys who want to be steamboatmen. The return finds it a city of fifteen thousand, with water-works and a new depot, and the hill above it still giving the same view of the river and the Illinois woods.
- New Orleans: The city at the foot of the river, entered over the levee with the water level with the streets. Twain gives it Canal Street, the cemeteries of vaults above ground, the French quarter under George Cable’s guidance, the word lagniappe, Mardi Gras, a cock-fight, a mule race and an undertaker who explains why an epidemic is bad for business.
- The 1882 travellers: The narrator, a poet and a stenographer, going down the river under invented names to see what has become of it. The names last six hours. The three of them are the comic engine of the second half: they quarrel over a treasure, listen to yarns, and are forever being told that the place they want to see no longer exists.
Core Themes
- Learning the river: The central subject is an education, and the book follows it in detail: the names of points, the shape of bends, the depth of crossings, the marks that tell the stage of the water. Bixby insists that a pilot must know the river as a man knows his own front hall, and that the knowledge must be exact, not approximate. The cost is stated plainly in Chapter IX, where the trained eye stops seeing a sunset and starts seeing a bluff reef, a rising river and a snag waiting for a boat. What the pilot gains in safety he loses in beauty, and Twain does not pretend the exchange is even.
- Memory as an instrument: Piloting, as the book describes it, is a feat of memory before it is anything else. The pilot carries twelve hundred miles of river in his head, with every crossing, shoal and landmark, and must revise the whole of it as the channel moves. Twain compares this with knowing the Bible by heart and finds the comparison modest. The chapter on a pilot’s needs is also a chapter about how a trained mind works: the leadsman cries half twain for an hour, one quarter twain goes in without emphasis, and weeks later the pilot can put the boat back on that spot. The book’s admiration for this faculty is one of its steadiest feelings.
- A river that will not hold still: The Mississippi of the book is never the same river twice. It cuts off its own bends, shortens itself by thirty miles at a jump, leaves towns inland and moves state lines; a man may go to bed in Mississippi and wake in Louisiana. Against this the book sets the engineers: the levees, the wing-dams, the jetties, the snag-boats, the beacons and the Commission. Twain admires the attempt and doubts it, and Uncle Mumford’s opinion, delivered between shouts at his crew, is that the river will foreclose on the whole enterprise in the end. The comedy and the geology point the same way.
- The end of the steamboat age: The book is an elegy written by a man who is not quite willing to be elegiac. The old pilots are dead, blown up, retired to farms they cannot work, or reduced to employees who must stand watch while tied up to the bank. The wharves are empty, the boats few, and the through trade has gone to the railroad. Yet Twain keeps the comedy going: the association that corners the trade, the race that empties the valley of talk, the mate who curses like weather. The loss is real, and it is measured by the noise that has gone out of the river.
- Fact, tall tale and the war: The book is a memoir that keeps admitting it is a performance. Twain reports that steamboatmen lied to strangers as a matter of courtesy, and then gives us an alligator pilot, a thumb-print murder, a reformed convict’s letter that turns out to be a swindle, and a feud that lasts sixty years over a cow. Around these he sets the war: the caves at Vicksburg, the pilot on the floor of the pilot-house at Belmont, the South that dates everything from before or after the war. The tall tale and the history are not opposites here; both are ways of getting at a river country that has already begun to disappear.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Life on the Mississippi?
The download is the whole book, not a selection. It begins with the Harper’s editorial on the body of the nation that the edition prints before Chapter I, runs through all sixty chapters from the first measurements of the river to the last page at St. Paul, and carries the Appendix entire: the relief-boat dispatches from the flood of 1882, the argument for the Mississippi River Commission, the account of Basil Hall’s reception, and the Indian tale from Schoolcraft. Nothing is cut, and no chapter is replaced by a summary.
Around the text the page supplies what a book of this shape needs: twelve summaries covering five chapters each, so that the two parts stay distinct; six notes on the river, the pilot, the town and the city; five themes that follow the argument about memory, change and loss; and a short account of the steamboat age, the flood of 1882 and the travellers whose books Twain quotes. The chapter breaks are the book’s own, so a passage found here can be looked up in any edition that prints the sixty chapters.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same chapter breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by USB or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed for any of them, and nothing in the downloads is locked, watermarked or time limited, so the files keep working long after the app you first opened them in is gone.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #245 — the complete text, unabridged, with the sixty chapters, the chapter titles and the four parts of the Appendix as the transcription prints them.
- Complete text of all sixty chapters Every chapter from the river’s history to the head of navigation at St. Paul, the editorial that stands before Chapter I, and the Appendix in four parts, with no passage abridged or replaced by a summary.
- One summary for each group of five chapters Twelve summaries in reading order, each covering five consecutive chapters and stopping at the end of the fifth, so that the page can be read beside the book without running ahead of it.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the chapter numbers and the Appendix intact and no reader software to install beyond the one you already use.
- Twain’s first travel book, published fourteen years earlier, in which the same narrator goes abroad with the same appetite for a good story and a bad guidebook. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The novel that grew out of the river years, with a chapter of the raft quoted in Chapter III of this book and the same stretch of water running through it. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of our free classics in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, all in the same clean text. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The book is sixty chapters and an Appendix, and the groups below are editorial: five consecutive chapters each, except that the Appendix is folded into the last group. The first twenty chapters are the apprenticeship, ending with the explosion of the Pennsylvania; Chapter XXI carries the narrator through the war, and the return begins with Chapter XXII. The chapter numbers and titles are the edition’s throughout, and each summary stops where its fifth chapter stops.
- Chapters I–V — The river’s history, and a boy on the levee: The book opens with the river’s size, its mud and its cut-offs, then follows De Soto, Joliet and Marquette and La Salle down it. Early commerce comes in keelboats and rafts, with a chapter of Huck Finn’s raft borrowed from a novel in progress. In Hannibal every boy wants to be a steamboatman, and the narrator runs away to try.
- Chapters VI–X — Learning the river: Bixby takes him on for five hundred dollars out of his first wages and begins the lessons: the shape of the banks, the crossings, the soundings, the plantation found on a black night. The note-book fills and the river becomes a set of marks. Then the water turns from a picture into a page of warnings.
- Chapters XI–XV — The rising river and the pilots’ guild: A great rise opens chutes behind the bars, and the boat feels its way through a drowned country. Sounding parties lay buoys, and one night the steamer runs down her own yawl. The chapters turn to the pilot’s memory and wages, and to the Pilots’ Benevolent Association, which corners the trade with a mail-bag lock and a secret sign.
- Chapters XVI–XX — Races, Brown, and the Pennsylvania: Racing days, when a contest between two boats empties the valley of talk; the cut-offs that move towns and state lines; a new pilot named Brown, who bullies the cub until the cub knocks him down with a stool. Then the Pennsylvania’s boilers explode below Memphis, and the narrator watches his brother die of the burns among forty wounded men.
- Chapters XXI–XXV — The war, and a return in disguise: A short chapter carries him from his license through the war and a string of trades. Twenty-one years later he goes back with a poet and a stenographer under false names, and the disguise lasts six hours before a pilot recognises him. The river has built a tow-head in front of St. Genevieve, and the boats are few.
- Chapters XXVI–XXX — Under fire, and down the map: A pilot tells how he lay on the floor of the pilot-house through the fight at Belmont, and a passenger explains the Darnell and Watson feud. Tourists’ books are quoted against the river they describe, the snag-boats and beacons are given their due, and Murel’s gang is recalled. Then the river sketches begin, with emigrant families hailing the boat.
- Chapters XXXI–XXXV — A thumb-print, and a town that is gone: A dying German watchman in Munich tells a long story of a thumb-print and a murder, which ends with the narrator trying to land at Napoleon, Arkansas, and learning that the river has carried the town away. Island law, cotton planting, mosquitoes and the siege of Vicksburg follow, with the cave life told by a man who lived in one.
- Chapters XXXVI–XL — Yarns, and the house beautiful: A professor’s yarn about a cattleman and three card-sharps ends with the Gold Dust’s boilers exploding at Hickman a few months later. The book then sets the planter’s house beside the steamboat cabin and compares their versions of magnificence, and reaches Baton Rouge, where Sir Walter Scott is blamed for the castle on the hill.
- Chapters XLI–XLV — New Orleans: The city is entered over the levee, with the water level with the streets. The chapters cover the cemeteries and the cost of a funeral, an undertaker’s cheerful account of his trade, the French quarter with George Cable as guide, the word lagniappe, a cock-fight and a mule race.
- Chapters XLVI–L — Mardi Gras, Uncle Remus, and the old pilots: Mardi Gras gives Twain a text against Scott and the medieval South; Joel Chandler Harris comes to breakfast and is too shy to read aloud. Bixby turns up unchanged, a sugar plantation is visited, and the talk runs to pilot-farmers, men who died at the wheel, and Captain Isaiah Sellers, whose pen name the narrator took for his own.
- Chapters LI–LV — Up the river, and back to Hannibal: The return north begins with a storm and a stage-struck blacksmith who remains a Roman soldier for thirty-four years. A chapter on a forged convict’s letter ends in a hoax exposed, and the last three go back to Hannibal: the town seen from Holiday’s Hill, two boys drowned, and the carpenter who claimed to have killed sixty men named Lynch.
- Chapters LVI–LX — The upper river, St. Paul, and the Appendix: A boy’s guilt over a tramp burned in the calaboose, then the upper river towns, Keokuk and Burlington and the orator Henry Clay Dean. The last chapters reach St. Paul and Minneapolis, turn on whiskey and a White-bear Lake legend, and end in Chicago. The Appendix prints the flood letters, the River Commission’s case and an Indian tale from Schoolcraft.
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Part of: Classic Fiction · 1880s
