Life on the Mississippi

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.