The first book to provide a comprehensive narrative account of Mark Twain's intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi. This expansive study traces two separate but richly intertwined stories of the river as America moved from the aftermath of the Civil War toward modernity.
"Thomas Ruys Smith's book will be required reading for anyone interested in Mark Twain and / or Mississippi river culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Framing both Twain and the river in new and often unexpectedly rewarding ways, it ranges widely through biography, literature, history, geopolitics, music and other forms of popular culture, issues of national and transnational identity, and much, much, more besides. An outstanding contribution to its various fields."--Peter Messent, co-editor of The Letters of Mark Twain and Joseph Hopkins Twichell
"Mark Twain knew a thing or two about the Mississippi River. So does Thomas Ruys Smith. In Deep Water, Smith intertwines the life and literature of Twain with the experiences and perspectives of many other people who lived, worked, and played along the Mississippi. Thanks to Smith, we now have a book that fully accounts for Twain's complicated relationship with the Mississippi, a river that captured, and continues to capture, the American imagination."--Michael Pasquier, editor of Gods of the Mississippi
"This is the story of a great American writer and a great American river, and the relationship between the two. Thomas Ruys Smith's elegantly written, deeply researched account brings us closer to Mark Twain by enriching our understanding of the river that flowed through his life and work. We see the Mississippi worlds that made Twain, and come away with immeasurably deeper insight into the worlds he made."--Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers
"By embedding Twain's canonical work on the Mississippi River in the context of what numerous less celebrated others wrote on the same subject, Thomas Ruys Smith provides a valuable new perspective on Twain's vision, not just of the river, but of race, gender, imperialism, and national culture."--Andrew Levy, author of Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece
