Point of View

Life on the Mississippi is told from the point of view of Mark Twain (his pen name; Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens), the writer and former steamboat captain who later returns to trace his earlier footsteps up and down the river. Twain's point of view is unique in that he has seen the entire rise and fall of the steamboat industry: from his days as a boy, when steamboats were the most important and almost the only way to trade goods throughout a large part of the United States, to the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when the industry had in large part been replaced by trains and the geography of the Mississippi had changed enormously. Twain's point of view, though limited mostly to his personal experiences, is also vast in that he describes the larger historical context in which...