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Life on the Mississippi

Part of Modern Library Classics

Author Mark Twain
Introduction by Bill McKibben
Notes by James Danly
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Paperback
$13.00 US
Random House Group | Modern Library
On sale May 29, 2007 | 416 Pages | 978-0-375-75937-6
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  • English > Comparative Literature > Major Themes: Satire and Humor
  • English > Literature > American Literature – Non-Fiction
  • English > Literature > American Literature Survey – 1870 to Present
  • English > Literature > American Literature Survey – Colonial to Modern
  • About
  • Excerpt
  • Author
Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write.

Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.
Chapter I

the river and its history

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.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the “Passes,” above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi’s depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable—not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)—about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.

An article in the New Orleans “Times-Democrat,” based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico—which brings to mind Captain Marryat’s rude name for the Mississippi—“the Great Sewer.” This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land—but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cut-off has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg.

Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.

The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat bodily—is always moving bodily sidewise. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original site of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. Nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi River which La Salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places.

Although the Mississippi’s mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulf’s billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet’s Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.

But enough of these examples of the mighty stream’s eccentricities for the present—I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

Let us drop the Mississippi’s physical history, and say a word about its historical history—so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest- awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book.

The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word “new” in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;—as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don’t see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it.

The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.

For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I’s defeat at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, sans peur et sans reproche; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,—the act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the “Heptameron” and some religious books,—the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being sometimes better literature- preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and the classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther’s death; eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; “Don Quixote” was not yet written; Shakspeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.

Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to multiply the river’s dimensions by ten—the Spanish custom of the day—and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may “sense” the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakspeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we don’t allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey, “for lagniappe”;* and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,—so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it.

But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance.

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.

Chapter II

the river and its explorers

La Salle himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi.

And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers travelled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to “explain hell to the salvages.”

On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: “Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.” He continues: “Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.”
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Twain. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
MARK TWAIN, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting that inspired his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at 12 when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, described by writer William Dean Howells as “the Lincoln of our literature.” Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had four children—a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean. View titles by Mark Twain

About

Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write.

Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.

Excerpt

Chapter I

the river and its history

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.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the “Passes,” above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi’s depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable—not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)—about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.

An article in the New Orleans “Times-Democrat,” based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico—which brings to mind Captain Marryat’s rude name for the Mississippi—“the Great Sewer.” This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land—but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.

The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cut-off has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg.

Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.

The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat bodily—is always moving bodily sidewise. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original site of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. Nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi River which La Salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places.

Although the Mississippi’s mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulf’s billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet’s Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.

But enough of these examples of the mighty stream’s eccentricities for the present—I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

Let us drop the Mississippi’s physical history, and say a word about its historical history—so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest- awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book.

The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word “new” in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;—as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don’t see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it.

The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.

For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I’s defeat at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, sans peur et sans reproche; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,—the act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the “Heptameron” and some religious books,—the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being sometimes better literature- preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and the classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther’s death; eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; “Don Quixote” was not yet written; Shakspeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.

Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to multiply the river’s dimensions by ten—the Spanish custom of the day—and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may “sense” the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakspeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we don’t allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey, “for lagniappe”;* and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,—so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it.

But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance.

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.

Chapter II

the river and its explorers

La Salle himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi.

And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers travelled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to “explain hell to the salvages.”

On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: “Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.” He continues: “Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.”
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Twain. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

MARK TWAIN, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting that inspired his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at 12 when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, described by writer William Dean Howells as “the Lincoln of our literature.” Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had four children—a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean. View titles by Mark Twain

Additional formats

  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-553-90400-0
    $1.99 US
    Ebook
    Bantam Classics
    May 29, 2007
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-679-64204-6
    $2.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Oct 31, 2000
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-553-21349-2
    $4.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Bantam Classics
    Oct 01, 1983
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-553-90400-0
    $1.99 US
    Ebook
    Bantam Classics
    May 29, 2007
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-679-64204-6
    $2.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Oct 31, 2000
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-553-21349-2
    $4.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Bantam Classics
    Oct 01, 1983

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    978-0-679-64568-9
    $49.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Feb 06, 2012
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    H. G. Adler
    978-0-8129-8060-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jan 10, 2012
  • The Ambassadors
    The Ambassadors
    Henry James
    978-0-8129-8270-1
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jan 10, 2012
  • The Eternal Husband and Other Stories
    The Eternal Husband and Other Stories
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
    978-0-8129-8337-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jan 03, 2012
  • Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens
    Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6935-1
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 13, 2011
  • All's Well That Ends Well
    All's Well That Ends Well
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6937-5
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 13, 2011
  • The Two Gentlemen of Verona
    The Two Gentlemen of Verona
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6938-2
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 13, 2011
  • Cymbeline
    Cymbeline
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6942-9
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 13, 2011
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor
    The Merry Wives of Windsor
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6932-0
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 14, 2011
  • The Comedy of Errors
    The Comedy of Errors
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6933-7
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Coriolanus
    Coriolanus
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6934-4
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Julius Caesar
    Julius Caesar
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6936-8
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 14, 2011
  • Dusk and Other Stories
    Dusk and Other Stories
    James Salter
    978-0-8129-8113-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    May 10, 2011
  • Under Western Eyes
    Under Western Eyes
    Joseph Conrad
    978-0-307-76969-5
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    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Oct 27, 2010
  • Measure for Measure
    Measure for Measure
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6928-3
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 14, 2010
  • The Taming of the Shrew
    The Taming of the Shrew
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6929-0
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    Modern Library
    Sep 14, 2010
  • Richard II
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    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6930-6
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 14, 2010
  • Troilus and Cressida
    Troilus and Cressida
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6931-3
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  • The Beautiful and Damned
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    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47635-7
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    Paperback
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  • Ethics
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    The Essential Writings
    978-0-8129-7778-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 10, 2010
  • As You Like It
    As You Like It
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6922-1
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    May 04, 2010
  • Twelfth Night
    Twelfth Night
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6923-8
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    May 04, 2010
  • Henry V
    Henry V
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6926-9
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    May 04, 2010
  • The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6927-6
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    May 04, 2010
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    A Novel
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-47555-8
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-47556-5
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Canterbury Tales
    The Canterbury Tales
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    978-0-8129-7845-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
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  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    Charles Dickens
    978-0-8129-8045-5
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Oct 06, 2009
  • This Side of Paradise
    This Side of Paradise
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47451-3
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Journey
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    A Novel
    H. G. Adler
    978-0-8129-7831-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
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  • Othello
    Othello
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6915-3
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
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  • Much Ado About Nothing
    Much Ado About Nothing
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6917-7
    $8.00 US
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    Modern Library
    Aug 25, 2009
  • Romeo and Juliet
    Romeo and Juliet
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6921-4
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 25, 2009
  • Henry IV, Part 1
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    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6924-5
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
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  • Henry IV, Part 2
    Henry IV, Part 2
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6925-2
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    Paperback
    Modern Library
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  • Les Misérables
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    Victor Hugo
    978-0-8129-7426-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
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  • The Belly of Paris
    The Belly of Paris
    Emile Zola
    978-0-8129-7422-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    May 12, 2009
  • King Lear
    King Lear
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6911-5
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Apr 14, 2009
  • Macbeth
    Macbeth
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6916-0
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Apr 14, 2009
  • Antony and Cleopatra
    Antony and Cleopatra
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6918-4
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Apr 14, 2009
  • The Winter's Tale
    The Winter's Tale
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6919-1
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Apr 14, 2009
  • The Sonnets and Other Poems
    The Sonnets and Other Poems
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6920-7
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Apr 14, 2009
  • Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte
    978-0-307-45519-2
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2009
  • Mr. Beluncle
    Mr. Beluncle
    A Novel
    V. S. Pritchett
    978-0-307-53865-9
    $2.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Feb 19, 2009
  • The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson
    The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson
    James Weldon Johnson
    978-0-8129-7532-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Oct 21, 2008
  • Paradise Lost
    Paradise Lost
    John Milton
    978-0-375-75796-9
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 09, 2008
  • Hamlet
    Hamlet
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6909-2
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 12, 2008
  • The Tempest
    The Tempest
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6910-8
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 12, 2008
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream
    A Midsummer Night's Dream
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6912-2
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 12, 2008
  • Richard III
    Richard III
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6913-9
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 12, 2008
  • Love's Labour's Lost
    Love's Labour's Lost
    William Shakespeare
    978-0-8129-6914-6
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Aug 12, 2008
  • Georges
    Georges
    Alexandre Dumas
    978-0-8129-7589-5
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 10, 2008
  • Anne of Green Gables
    Anne of Green Gables
    L. M. Montgomery
    978-0-8129-7903-9
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 10, 2008
  • Nada: Una novela
    Nada: Una novela
    Carmen Laforet
    978-0-8129-7771-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Feb 12, 2008
  • The Prince
    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    978-0-8129-7805-6
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Feb 05, 2008
  • Jacques Futrelle's "The Thinking Machine"
    Jacques Futrelle's "The Thinking Machine"
    The Enigmatic Problems of Prof. Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., M. D. S.
    Jacques Futrelle
    978-0-307-43133-2
    $5.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Dec 18, 2007
  • Pure Pagan
    Pure Pagan
    Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
    978-0-307-43164-6
    $13.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Dec 18, 2007
  • Representative Men
    Representative Men
    Seven Lectures
    Ralph Waldo Emerson
    978-0-307-43169-1
    $10.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Dec 18, 2007
  • Tono-Bungay
    Tono-Bungay
    H. G. Wells
    978-0-307-43282-7
    $2.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Dec 18, 2007
  • When the Sleeper Wakes
    When the Sleeper Wakes
    H. G. Wells
    978-0-307-43287-2
    $2.99 US
    Ebook
    Modern Library
    Dec 18, 2007
  • Siddhartha
    Siddhartha
    Hermann Hesse
    978-0-8129-7478-2
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Dec 04, 2007
  • The Essential Feminist Reader
    The Essential Feminist Reader
    978-0-8129-7460-7
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Sep 18, 2007
  • Northanger Abbey
    Northanger Abbey
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38683-0
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Emma
    Emma
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38684-7
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Sense and Sensibility
    Sense and Sensibility
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38687-8
    $6.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Mansfield Park
    Mansfield Park
    Jane Austen
    978-0-307-38688-5
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2007
  • The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow
    The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow
    Clarence Darrow
    978-0-8129-6677-0
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jun 12, 2007

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  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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  • Life on the Mississippi
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  • Roughing It
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  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
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  • Four Classic American Novels
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    The Scarlet Letter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The RedBadge Of Courage, Billy Budd
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  • The Innocents Abroad
    The Innocents Abroad
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  • The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain's Short Stories
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  • The Gilded Age
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  • The Portable Mark Twain
    The Portable Mark Twain
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  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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  • The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain
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  • A Tramp Abroad
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  • The Prince and the Pauper
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  • The Innocents Abroad
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    978-0-8129-6705-0
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  • Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
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  • The Innocents Abroad
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  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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  • The Gilded Age
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  • A Tramp Abroad
    A Tramp Abroad
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  • The Prince and the Pauper
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    Penguin Classics
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  • Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches
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  • Four Great American Classics
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  • Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
    Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
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    $30.00 US
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  • Life on the Mississippi
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    978-0-14-039050-6
    $13.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
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  • The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
    The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
    Mark Twain
    978-0-553-21195-5
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Bantam Classics
    Mar 01, 1984
  • Roughing It
    Roughing It
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-039010-0
    $17.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
    Dec 17, 1981
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043064-6
    $10.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
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  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    and Those Extraordinary Twins
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043040-0
    $13.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
    Sep 30, 1969
  • The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine
    The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine
    Mark Twain, Philip C. Stead, Erin Stead
    978-0-593-30382-5
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    Yearling
    Mar 09, 2021
  • Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain, Volume 1
    Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain, Volume 1
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    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-90770-2
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    Everyman's Library
    Nov 15, 2016
  • Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain, Volume 2
    Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain, Volume 2
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    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-90772-6
    $30.00 US
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    Nov 15, 2016
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-87310-6
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    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-87311-3
    $13.00 US
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    Feb 03, 2015
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-310732-3
    $8.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
    Oct 28, 2014
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-310733-0
    $9.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
    Oct 28, 2014
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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    978-0-14-119957-3
    $23.00 US
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    Penguin Classics
    Sep 30, 2014
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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    $7.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
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  • The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories
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    Signet
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
    The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
    Introduction by Adam Gopnik
    Mark Twain
    978-0-307-95937-9
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Autobiographical Writings
    Autobiographical Writings
    Mark Twain
    978-1-101-58943-4
    $12.99 US
    Ebook
    Penguin Classics
    May 29, 2012
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Mark Twain, Lilli Carre
    978-0-14-310594-7
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Oct 27, 2009
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53120-9
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    Mar 03, 2009
  • Roughing It
    Roughing It
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53110-0
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    Nov 04, 2008
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53093-6
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    May 06, 2008
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53094-3
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    May 06, 2008
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-132109-7
    $8.99 US
    Paperback
    Puffin Books
    Mar 27, 2008
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-132110-3
    $8.99 US
    Paperback
    Puffin Books
    Mar 27, 2008
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53074-5
    $4.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    Dec 04, 2007
  • Four Classic American Novels
    Four Classic American Novels
    The Scarlet Letter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The RedBadge Of Courage, Billy Budd
    Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53055-4
    $8.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    Jun 05, 2007
  • The Innocents Abroad
    The Innocents Abroad
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53049-3
    $7.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    Apr 03, 2007
  • The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain's Short Stories
    The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain's Short Stories
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-53016-5
    $7.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    May 02, 2006
  • The Gilded Age
    The Gilded Age
    Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner
    978-0-8129-7356-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Mar 14, 2006
  • The Portable Mark Twain
    The Portable Mark Twain
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-243775-9
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Nov 30, 2004
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-52958-9
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    Nov 02, 2004
  • The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain
    The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain
    Mark Twain
    978-0-8129-7118-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Apr 13, 2004
  • A Tramp Abroad
    A Tramp Abroad
    Mark Twain
    978-0-8129-7003-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Oct 14, 2003
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    978-0-375-76112-6
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Jul 08, 2003
  • The Innocents Abroad
    The Innocents Abroad
    or, The New Pilgrims' Progress
    Mark Twain
    978-0-8129-6705-0
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Feb 11, 2003
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
    Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
    Mark Twain
    978-0-8129-6622-0
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Oct 08, 2002
  • The Innocents Abroad
    The Innocents Abroad
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-243708-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Jul 30, 2002
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    978-0-451-52835-3
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Signet
    May 01, 2002
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    Mark Twain, Daniel Carter Beard
    978-0-375-75780-8
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Dec 04, 2001
  • The Gilded Age
    The Gilded Age
    A Tale of Today
    Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner
    978-0-14-043920-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Sep 01, 2001
  • A Tramp Abroad
    A Tramp Abroad
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043608-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Dec 01, 1997
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043669-3
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Dec 01, 1997
  • Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches
    Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043417-0
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Sep 01, 1994
  • Four Great American Classics
    Four Great American Classics
    Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, Mark Twain
    978-0-553-21362-1
    $8.99 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Bantam Classics
    Dec 01, 1992
  • Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
    Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
    Introduction by Miles Donald
    Mark Twain
    978-0-679-40584-9
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 26, 1991
  • Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-039050-6
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Feb 05, 1985
  • The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
    The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
    Mark Twain
    978-0-553-21195-5
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Bantam Classics
    Mar 01, 1984
  • Roughing It
    Roughing It
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-039010-0
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Dec 17, 1981
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043064-6
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Feb 28, 1972
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    and Those Extraordinary Twins
    Mark Twain
    978-0-14-043040-0
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Classics
    Sep 30, 1969
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