Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain · 1883 CE · Narrative Non-fiction · Modern / American · Victorian
An apprentice learns to read the Mississippi as a text — every bar, bend and shoal memorised in both directions and at night — under a pilot who withholds praise absolutely. Returning two decades later, he finds the trade destroyed by the railroad and the river itself straightened and diminished. The technical chapters are the closest thing in American literature to a manual written as elegy.
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