Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain, published in 1883 and, notably, the first submission to a publisher of a typewritten manuscript. The memoir is in two parts. The first recounts Twain’s memories of a halcyon time before the Civil War when Twain was in training to become a steamboat pilot. Here, Twain fondly recounts life on the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. The second part of the memoir recounts the trip Twain made down the river many years later after the Civil War. The two parts reflect that as the Mississippi River separates America, east from west, the Civil War separated America, north and south, and continues to separate America, its past and its future. Twain loved his time as a cub pilot, mentored by a senior steamboat pilot, and, analogous to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, the first part of the memoir is brilliant with the light of youth, potential, and promise. The second part, coming as it does after the almost unfathomable, albeit necessary tragedy that was the Civil War, is the work of a man who’s lived, and has suffered both the good and the bad offered up in a life fully lived. He complains about the competition from the railroads, the rise of urban America with its new and large cities, and makes trenchant observations on greed, gullibility, and what he perceived to be bad architecture. Take the trip down the river with Mark Twain, the writer who knew America so well, its east and west, its north and south, its past and future. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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