On an empyreal spring evening in 1858, with the oleander in bloom upriver and early jasmine scenting the wind, the steersman for the Mississippi steamboat ... literature. Mark Twain’s ...

Chernow specializes in big American lives. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of George Washington, and another of his works inspired Lin Manuel Miranda to make Alexander Hamilton into a ...

The young Mark Twain longed to work on a steamboat. His daydreaming was disrupted one day by the appearance of a boy who had been away for a long time. This boy was now an apprentice steamboat ...

In an often-excerpted passage from his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes how his perceptions of the ...

Clarke Campbell “Doc” Hawley, who not only piloted the steamboat ... Post in 1982. “Mark Twain, should he return, would be perfectly happy talking shop with Doc Hawley.” Captain Clarke ...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens may well have led a happier life if he had remained a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. But then he never would have become Mark Twain — with all the heartache, frustration ...