Through Mark Twain's iconic river books, the Mississippi has become an imagined river as much as a real one. Yet despite the central place that Twain's river occupies in the national imagination, until now, no work has explored the shifting meaning of this crucial connection in a single volume.

Thomas Ruys Smith, senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, is the author of River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain and Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century. He also edited the anthology Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories.

 

ISBN: 9780807171097

Hardcover

344 pages

6 x 9

Bibliography, Index, Table of Contents

LSU Press, 2019