Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

First published: 1883

Type of work: Memoir

Principal characters

• The Narrator, a former steamboat pilot
• Mr. Bixby, the master pilot who trains him
• Henry, the narrator’s brother, a clerk on the Pennsylvania
• Mr. Brown, an unpleasant pilot on the Pennsylvania
• Thompson (the poet) and Rogers (the stenographer), the narrator’s travel companions in 1882
• “Uncle” Mumford, a mate on the Gold Dust
• Robert Styles, a pilot on the Gold Dust
• Karl Ritter, a German whom the narrator meets in Munich

The Story:

As a boy growing up in a Mississippi River town, the narrator has the common ambition of becoming a steamboatman. He especially wants to be a pilot. Later, while living in Cincinnati, he decides to make his fortune in the Amazon and buys passage on the steamboat Paul Jones to New Orleans, from where he intends to sail to the Amazon. After arriving in New Orleans, however, he discovers that he will not be able to continue his journey, so he looks for a new career. He lays siege to Mr. Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, and persuades the man to accept him as a cub pilot on the return voyage upriver.

The new pilot begins his education under Bixby’s tutelage by steering the Paul Jones out of New Orleans and listening to Bixby call attention to monotonously nondescript points along the way. At midnight on his first day, he is rudely turned out of his bed to stand watch—his first intimation that piloting might not be quite as romantic as he had imagined. His second such intimation comes when he learns that Bixby expects him to remember everything he is told. As the boat continues upriver, the narrator’s new notebook fills with information, but his head remains empty.

After switching boats at St. Louis for the return trip, the cub pilot discovers that downstream navigation differs greatly from upstream navigation. In fact, each time he thinks he is mastering his new trade, Bixby piles on more facts for him to learn. He is expected to memorize the river’s features and its shape, then he has to learn the river’s depths and how to “read” it like a book. Eventually, the narrator thinks his education is complete, only to be told that he now has to learn how to read the river’s fluctuating depths from its banks. His education continues.

The narrator relates the minutiae of piloting because he loves the profession more than any other. In the early days, he says, a steamboat pilot was the only completely unfettered human being on earth. That situation began changing before the Civil War, when the rapid increase in licensed pilots started cutting into wages. A handful of bold veterans reversed the trend by forming a professional association that forced the steamboat companies to restore their former wages. Shortly after, however, the war halted commercial steamboat traffic, and it never recovered because of postwar competition from railroads and tow barges.

A prime example of a master pilot with an exceptional memory, Bixby proves his skill by switching to the more difficult Missouri River, where he quickly earns a new license. Meanwhile, the young cub stays on the Mississippi and apprentices himself on the Pennsylvania under the despotic tutelage of Mr. Brown. His younger brother Henry has joined the Pennsylvania as a lowly clerk. One day, Brown assaults Henry, which provokes the narrator to beat Brown. The narrator thinks that with this act he has ruined his career, but kindly Captain Klinefelter approves of what he has done and even offers to put Brown ashore in New Orleans. Not feeling up to assuming Brown’s piloting responsibilities, the cub himself stays ashore and then follows the Pennsylvania upriver on another boat. Near Memphis, Tennessee, he learns that the Pennsylvania’s boilers have exploded, killing 150 people, his own brother among them, and Brown has disappeared.

Eventually the narrator earns his license and becomes steadily employed as a pilot. Soon, however, the Civil War intervenes and brings his occupation to an end. Twenty-one years later—after going through a succession of careers—he decides to return to the Mississippi, and he enlists a poet named Thompson and a stenographer named Rogers to accompany him. At St. Louis, they board the Gold Dust, on which the narrator quickly begins discovering how much steamboating has changed. Traveling under a pseudonym, he sits quietly in the pilothouse and listens while the pilot, Robert Styles—who had once been his fellow cub—tries to impress him with outrageous lies before revealing that he had recognized him immediately.

As the Gold Dust travels south, the mate, “Uncle” Mumford, and other crew members recount the river’s recent history and the impact of the Civil War on southern towns. The narrator observes how much navigational techniques have been modernized—a development that he feels has destroyed the river’s romance.

As the boat nears Napoleon, Arkansas, the narrator tells his companions an amazing story about a German named Ritter whose last wish he had promised to fulfill by retrieving ten thousand dollars that Ritter had hidden in Napoleon and sending it to the son of a man whom Ritter had wronged. The story arouses avarice among the narrator’s companions until they learn that the entire town of Napoleon has been washed away by a flood.

At Vicksburg, Mississippi, the travelers switch to another steamboat that takes them to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they enter the “absolute South,” where romantic influences in architecture remind the narrator of the debilitating influence that Sir Walter Scott’s Romanticism has had on the region. In New Orleans, the narrator spends much of his visit with authors George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris. He also meets Horace Bixby, who is now captain of the City of Baton Rouge. The narrator, Bixby, and other old-time pilots swap stories about former rivermen, including Captain Isaiah Sellers, from whom the narrator has appropriated his pen name, “Mark Twain.” After returning to St. Louis on Bixby’s boat, the narrator continues upriver to Hannibal, Missouri—his boyhood home. There he recalls poignant memories from his youth. He then travels north by boat to St. Paul, Minnesota, from where he later returns home by land.

Bibliography

Camfield, Gregg. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Comprehensive collection of original essays presents discussion of Twain’s individual works, covering topics such as themes, characters, language, and subjects that interested Twain. Includes an appendix on researching Twain that lists useful secondary sources and an extensive annotated bibliography of Twain’s novels, plays, poems, and other writings.

Coulombe, Joseph L. “Moneyed Ruffians: The New American Hero in Life on the Mississippi.” In Mark Twain and the American West. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Analyzes the book and some of Twain’s other works to describe how he deliberately altered nineteenth century concepts of the American West. Examines the central role of the West in creating Twain’s public persona.

Cox, James M. “Life on the Mississippi Revisited.” In The Mythologizing of Mark Twain, edited by Sara deSaussure Davis and Phillip D. Beidler. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Presents a persuasive argument that Life on the Mississippi converts the life of Samuel L. Clemens into the “myth” of Mark Twain.

Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Masterful work—a complete revision of Emerson’s The Authentic Mark Twain (1984)—traces the development of Twain’s writing against the events in his life and provides illuminating discussions of many individual works.

Hellwig, Harold H. Mark Twain’s Travel Literature: The Odyssey of a Mind. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Analyzes Life on the Mississippi and Twain’s other travel literature, describing his depictions of time, place, and identity. Demonstrates how the travel literature reflects Twain’s nostalgia for a disappearing America, his concern about Native American assimilation, and his own quest for personal and national identity. Argues that the theme of travel is also central to Twain’s fictional works.

Kruse, Horst H. Mark Twain and “Life on the Mississippi.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Excellent study that focuses on Twain’s composition of Life on the Mississippi. Concludes that one of Twain’s intentions was to help redeem the South from the Romanticism that brought on the Civil War.

Messent, Peter B. “Travel and Travel Writing: Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi.” In The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Provides a solid overview of Twain’s travel writing, placing it within the context of his other works.

Rasmussen, R. Kent. Critical Companion to Mark Twain: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. 2 vols. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Alphabetically arranged entries about the plots, characters, places, and other subjects relating to Twain’s writings and life. Features extended analytical essays on Twain’s major works, including Life on the Mississippi; an expanded and fully annotated bibliography of books about Twain; and a glossary explaining unusual words in Twain’s vocabulary, including terms related to steamboating.