Product Description The Mississippi River and Mark Twain are practically synonymous in American culture. Known as ''America 's river,'' the popularity of Twain's steamboat and steamboat pilot on the ever-changing Mississippi has endured for over a century. A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain's rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it. Samuel Clemens became a licensed river pilot at the age of twenty-four under the apprenticeship of Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones. His name, Mark Twain, was derived from the river pilot term describing safe navigating conditions, or ''mark two fathoms.'' This term was shortened to ''mark twain'' by the leadsmen whose job it was to monitor the water's depth and report it to the pilot. Although Mark Twain used his childhood experiences growing up along the Mississippi in numerous works, nowhere is the river and the pilot's life more thoroughly described than in Life on the Mississippi. Review ''Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.'' --William Faulkner About the Author Author Bio: MARK TWAIN (1835-1910) was born Samuel L. Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri. One of the most popular and influential authors our nation has ever produced, his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. He has been called not only the greatest humorist of his age but the father of American literature. Reader Bio: GROVER GARDNER is an award-winning narrator with over seven hundred titles to his credit. Named one of the ''Best Voices of the Century'' and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he won the prestigious Audie(tm) Award in 2009, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than twenty Earphones Awards.