Reread the excerpt from Mark Twain's book Life on the Mississippi. How do you think he feels about the end of keelboating on the Mississippi River? Support your response.

life on missupi

Twain uses this novel as a combination of an autobiography of his early days as a steamboats man, and a collection of anecdotes about the people who made their living both along the great river and on it. It was from this work that the novel Huckleberry Finn would emerge, using the raw material to set the backdrop for this work which is considered Twain’s greatest novel.

Mark Twain spent most of his early life in Hannibal, Missouri, the Mississippi river town that first gave him a taste of what it was like to live the life of a steamboat man. It was there that he was bitten by the bug of becoming a steamboat pilot, though that lay dormant for a time before he finally acted on it. Before Twain could pursue his passion on the steam boat, his father died, and he became apprenticed to a printer and began to write for his brother’s newspaper. It was in 1857, ten years after his father’s death, and after having begun work in many eastern cities as a printer, that Twain decided to go seek his fortune in South America. Before he could make it there, however, he had to go through the major port city of New Orleans. It was here in New Orleans that Twain decided to give up his possible fortune in South America and pursue his first and foremost passion, becoming a steamboat captain.

This part of Mark Twain’s life had a huge impact on his greatest writing, and it was in this time that he obtained the material he needed to write Life on the Mississippi. Reading through the book, it is obvious how much respect Twain has for the river itself. This is evident through the ways in which he describes its incredible size, and at the same time its minute complexities. His detailed descriptions and picturesque use of language within Life on the Mississippi serve to prove to Twain’s audience that he is indeed a serious and well spoken author. It is obvious that Twain affinity for the river itself is the source and backbone of this book, while Twain also manages to bring out the eccentricities of not only the river, but also of the people who populate it. These stories of workers, farmers, and steamboat captains serve to bring the novel alive.

Explanation:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun.

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