The famous journey of Tom Sawyer's friend Huck Finn, along the Mississippi River. When Huckleberry Finn flees from his brutal father, he meets up with an old friend, the slave Jim, who is also running away. Together, they travel by raft down the Mississippi, tumbling in and out of amazing adventures -- from a floating house to a funeral, a shipwreck to a circus -- and experience some of the strange ways of people in the Deep South.

Before his literary career took off and he emerged as one of America's foremost men of letters, Mark Twain worked as a steamboat pilot in the antebellum South and Midwest. This fascinating account offers a brief history of commercial boating in the period and a probing, insightful, and eminently entertaining look at Twain's own experiences.

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"The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand 'flatboat era' of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of America's first western frontier. Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious...

When a huge white whale gets stuck between the banks of the Mississippi River causing the water to stop flowing, Jean Laffite finds a way to get the river moving again.

Describes how Blanche Douglas Leathers studied the Mississippi River and passed the test to become a steamboat captain in 1894.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn find themselves in the middle of a fantastic adventure that takes them from the mighty Mississippi to the mysterious caverns of a secret hideout.