内容简介
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.
作者简介
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of
the most exciting of literary lives. Raised in the river town of
Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age 12 and was
successively a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted
Confederate soldier, and a prospector, miner, and reporter in the
western territories. His experiences furnished him with a wide
knowledge of humanity, as well as with the perfect grasp of local
customs and speech which manifests itself in his writing. With the
publication in 1865 of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist, and
the bestselling Innocents Abroad solidified his fame. But it wasn't
until Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary
establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever
produce.
Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and
financial failure, Twain grew more and more pessimistic—an outlook
not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm. Though his
fame continued to widen—Yale & Oxford awarded him honorary
degrees—Twain spent his last years in gloom and exasperation,
writing fables about "the damned human race."