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Mississippi Writings

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SKU:
627
Condition:
Very Good – Dust jacket shows light shelf wear. Binding tight, pages clean and crisp. Includes a previous owner’s inscription on the inside front cover.
Format:
Hardcover, 1126
Publisher:
Library of America, 1982
Edition:
The Library of America Series - Volume 5, Seventeenth Printing
Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our national writers. This Library of America collection presents his best-known works, together for the first time in one volume. Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery.

Mark Twain stands as one of America’s most beloved and widely read authors, and this Library of America edition brings together some of his most iconic works in a single volume for the first time.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer captures childhood with a nostalgic glow, a world where the innocence of play and mischief dissolves the complexities of adult life. It was during the same period that Twain began work on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel that would take years to complete, reflecting a growing tension between youthful freedom and the moral dilemmas of society. His journey back to the Mississippi River landscapes of his youth inspired Life on the Mississippi, where the river emerges as a living symbol of beauty, danger, and the currents of American life.

Twain’s storytelling is alive with comic adventures, memorable characters, and vivid settings. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn remain central to the American imagination, joined by unforgettable figures like Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson, whose story underscores the human costs of slavery and societal injustice. Across these works, Twain’s humor often masks a deeper awareness of hardship, culminating in Pudd’nhead Wilson, where playful antics reveal the darker realities of his time.

The Mississippi River threads through each narrative, embodying both the promise and contradictions of American civilization. It is a place where innocence meets experience, where the joys of childhood confront the harsh truths of slavery and society, and where Twain’s own experiences as a river pilot come vividly to life. This collection not only celebrates Twain’s humor and imagination but also highlights his profound reflections on freedom, morality, and the American spirit.

About the Author

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he 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 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.”

Guy Cardwell (1906–2005), volume editor, was emeritus professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He was the author of numerous books and articles about Mark Twain.