Barnes & Noble Digital Library

 In this 1871 memoir— drawing from the life experiences that also produced Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—Twain tells how he achieved his boyhood dream of navigating a steamboat along the treacherous, ever-changing banks of the great river. Written for William Dean Howells’s Atlantic magazine, this is the original, shorter version of Life on the Mississippi. This edition also contains the story "A Literary Nightmare."