Mark Twain's Life On The Mississippi

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Pages: 2
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Yakamisha Duckworth
Bethel University
Dr. Coffman

In the 1870s, Samuel Clemens thought about a way to get people to remember a vanishing steamboat era that changed his life. In Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, the author describes many different aspects of the river and its life in the nineteenth century. Overall, Twain writes about the Mississippi as a living, breathing being - it is by far the most important character in the story, and functions as a character throughout the narrative. Half history and half memoir, Life on the Mississippi begins with an historical examination of the river. Twain writes of its early detection by settlers and how, for many years, the river was unnoticed as anything but a simple natural fact:
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