The complete online text of Life on the Mississippi, Part 1. by Mark Twain.

An author and platform entertainer who became tremendously popular in his own day, Samuel Clemens participated in the major literary movements of the century and knew virtually every one of his distinguished contemporaries. Biographers have emphasized th...

Mark Twain's work captures the child that lives in the American psyche and also presents the confusions of the American adult. As a mature writer, Twain could recreate the small-town boyhood he had known by the Mississippi River in those halcyon years be...

In the early spring of 1835 John Marshall Clemens and his wife, Jane, loaded up their possessions, their five children, and their single slave in Three Forks, Tennessee, to move to Missouri. It was another in a long series of migrations which the family...

On the evening of June 21, Mount Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, offered a memorial service for James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Thirty years before, the three civil rights workers were murdered after visiting the burned ruins of the same...

BOATHOUSES ARE COMMONPLACE along the Mississippi River. For most, they serve a practical purpose: housing boats. But in a cluster of about 100 boathouses gin poled and tethered along Latsch Island, just across the Interstate Bridge from downtown Winona, boathouses house people. Since...