书名：Life on the Mississippi 密西西比河上
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1090
作者：Mark Twain 马克·吐温
出版社名称： Signet Classics
出版时间：2000
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531209
商品尺寸：13.2 x 1.9 x 21.2 cm
包装：简装
页数：374

Life on the Mississippi《密西西比河上》美国著名作家马克·吐温所著的一部自传型游记作品。主要讲述马克·吐温在美国内战前在密西西比河流中担任水手时发生的故事。既是一本游记，更是一部回忆录。表面上看，像是马克·吐温在阐述这自己在密西西比河上的所见所闻，但其实是作者运用其一贯的写作手法，从社会现象的视角，讽刺了当时背景下的社会现实。本书值得文学研究爱好者深入研读，借鉴写作手法，也适合英语语言学习者阅读。
“Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.”—William Faulkner 
Part travel book, part autobiography, and part social commentary,Life on the Mississippi is a memoir of the cub pilot’s apprenticeship, a record of Twain’s return to the river and to Hannibal as an adult, a meditation on the harsh vagaries of nature, and a study of the varied and sometimes violent activities engaged in by those who live on the river’s shores.  
With an Introduction by Justin Kaplan and an Afterword by John Seelye

Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, was host to riverboat travelers from around the world, providing a vigorous and variable atmosphere for the young Samuel Clemens to absorb. Clemens became a riverboat pilot and even chose his pen name—Mark Twain—from a term boatmen would call out signifying water depth at two fathoms, meaning safe clearance for travel. It was from this background that Life on the Mississippie merged. It is an epochal record of America’s growth, a stirring remembrance of her vanished past. And it earned for its author his first recognition as a serious writer. 
At once a romantic history of a mighty river, an autobiographical account of Twain’s early steamboat days, and a storehouse of humorous anecdotes and sketches, here is the raw material from which Mark Twain wrote his finest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835-1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Justin Kaplan is the author of numerous books including Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mark Twain and His World;Walt Whitman: A Life; and with his wife, Anne Bernays,  Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York.  In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

John Seelye is a leading American Studies scholar and Graduate Research Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of Florida. His books include The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation with Pictures, and Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republic Plan, 1755-1825.

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, withtheirsplint bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep —with shingle shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good businessin watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the levee; a pile of skids on the slope of the stonepaved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the point above the town, and the point below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea. and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote points; instantly a Negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry“S-t-e-a-m-boat acomin!” and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.