Despite the ring of truth in Ernest Hemingway's often-cited praise of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was wrong to insist that “There was nothing before” it. For Mark Twain, there was Life on the Mississippi before there was Huckleberry Finn. What's more, Life on the Mississippi is not simply the antecedent of Twain's most recognized book; it is also some of his most personal writing, an ambitious experiment in which he worked out his complex attitude about the authority he assumed as a writer. The Mississippi book is thus an indispensable landmark for mapping Twain's distrust of and desire for authority.

Corresponding to his divided attitude toward authority, Life on the Mississippi is a divided text. In part 1, Twain recycled “Old Times on the Mississippi” – the sketches of his life as a cub pilot originally published as seven installments in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875 – dividing the seven into fourteen chapters and framing them with six new chapters equally apportioned before and after the “Old Times” material. To this he joined the travel narrative of his 1882 riverboat journey down and up the Mississippi, after he had become a writer, which forms part 2 of the book.