THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'10,000 River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over and laugh at ...'

When river pilots negotiated the tricky shifting course of the Mississippi, a leadsman let down his weight to measure the depth, calling out 'Mark Twain!' in safe water. The cry gave a writer his pen name, taken in honour of the beloved river that flowed through all his greatest work. Through his idyllic childhood, skylarking and swimming with the coal-fleets, and his years as a steamboat pilot, learning every bend and shoal for hundreds of miles, the Mississippi spoke deeply to Twain about his own life and that of the American nation. It is a character as immortal in his novels as Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer.

Twain returned to his beloved Mississippi in 1882 to write something that would make the world 'look out!'. In this richly evocative memoir and travelogue, Twain vividly remembers the ordeals of his apprenticeship as a pilot, his brushes with authority and disaster, and the billiard-room profanities of a steamer's crew. The golden age of the steamboat forms the backdrop to his journey from St Louis to New Orleans, but the river was already changed by the Civil War and the coming of the railroad. Twain laments its transformation from commercial to tourist thoroughfare and the fading of romance from the pilot room. The narrative is peppered with some of his tallest tales and liveliest digressions. Here is all manner of 'loitering and gab': waspish broadsides on the purple prose of Southern reporters, the expense and folly of human burial, and the terrible destruction the river can wreak - 'yonder is the brick chimney - all that's left ... of the town'.