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No author is more closely associated with the Mississippi River than Mark Twain.
Twain was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When he was four, his family moved to the little town of Hannibal, along the shores of the Mississippi. Though Clemens left Hannibal at the age of 18 and later became a world-famous author and humorist, it was Hannibal and the Mississippi that inspired his greatest works.
◀ To Sam Clemens, Hannibal was “a boy’s paradise.” He spent his days there fishing, swimming, playing pranks, and hunting for lost treasure. After his father died, Clemens left school at the age of 12 to work as a printer, but he really wanted to become a riverboat pilot.
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.—from Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain
▲ Steamboats and immense log rafts traveled the busy Mississippi during Mark Twain’s lifetime. Here, a built-up Hannibal witnesses the action from the riverside.
Twain eventually got married and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1876, he published his first attempt to re-create the golden days of his youth. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer takes place in a fictionalized Hannibal. It includes the famous episode in which Tom gets his friends to pay him for the “privilege” of whitewashing a fence by convincing them that he is having more fun painting than they are watching. ▶
◀ In 1857, Sam Clemens’s dream came true when the captain of the Paul Jones hired him as a cub (apprentice) pilot. Clemens soon found himself back at “school” again. The pilot taught him to recognize every inch of the Mississippi. That included everything from sandbars, submerged trees, and islands to changing water depths and weather patterns. Clemens succeeded in becoming a pilot. But the beginning of the Civil War, on April 12, 1861, ended his riverboat career.
◀ For a short time, Clemens fought for the Confederate army. Then he headed west to mine in Nevada. He never struck it rich, but he did begin writing the humorous pieces that eventually brought him fame. In 1863, Clemens took the pen name Mark Twain, from a shout given when deckhands measured a river’s depth. They would drop leads, then cry out soundings. The cry “mark twain” meant two fathoms, or 12 feet, a safe depth for a boat.
Though Tom Sawyer was a huge success, Twain still had more to say about his boyhood on the Mississippi. In 1884, he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In this masterpiece of American literature, Tom’s friend Huck runs away from home, escaping his violent father (and civilization) as he floats down the Mississippi on a raft. En route, he is joined by Jim, an enslaved person who has run away. Their journey is filled with adventures. But it also confronts Huck with a profound question: should he turn in his friend Jim, since helping a runaway slave is against the law? Or should he help Jim, whom he has come to love and respect? As Huck works out his answer to this question, he slowly grows from a boy to a man. ▶
Think Piece!
What do you think Huck does? How would you act if you were in his place?
