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It's Time to Rediscover the Wonderful Books We All Cherish."The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable."-- Mark Twain0riginally published in 1883, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's memoir of his youthful years as a cub pilot on a steamboat paddling up and down the Mississippi River. Twain used his childhood experiences growing up along the Mississippi in a number of works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but nowhere is the river and the pilot's life more thoroughly described than in this work. Told with insight, humor, and candor, Life on the Mississippi is an American classic.

For the character of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, Dickens drew on a tragedy in his own life, the death at the age of seventeen of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth. Five years later he wrote, 'the desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now ... and I know (for I don't think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never diminish.'