"STEEAMMM-BOAT A-COMIN'!"
Old John Hannick's cry always brought all of Hannibal running, but none came faster than young Sam Clemens. For the Mississippi brought traders and planters, heroes and adventurers, gamblers and slave hunters all the robust, colorful life of America in the 1840's—to the straggly Missouri town. If he couldn't be a pirate when he grew up, Sam vowed, he would be a river pilot.
But for the time being, Sam and Tom Blankenship, the unkempt river rat Sam's father declared would hang someday, contented themselves with such matters as scaring the wits out of the revivalists at the Western Star Tavern, ferreting out the secret of Cave Hollow, and becoming authorities on sin and the devil. Sam's mother despaired of curbing his exuberance; even after Sam had served his apprenticeship as a printer and was putting out a weekly newspaper with Orion, his sober-minded brother, he still indulged in pranks. But Jane Clemens understood her son, too. "Sammy is like a book that's come alive," she said. "If you tear out the pages where he's a rascal, you spoil the best part of the story."
Her words were prophetic. For that "rascal," Sam Clemens, became Mark Twain, the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In this vigorous bi- ography of Mark Twain's early life, from his boyhood to the time he is a full-fledged river pilot on his beloved Mississippi, the well-known historian, Earl Schenck Miers, has brilliantly combined scholarship and imagination to recreate the rebellious mind and thoughts of the boy who grew up to be perhaps the greatest writer America has produced.
—from the dust jacket
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