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The restless young man drifted from one job to another, then found his first calling as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, an experience that would inform Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and other books.

All of this explains why Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, accused Walter Scott of starting the Civil War.

Times best sellers: Rinker Buck shares his adventures on a wooden flatboat in “Life On The Mississippi,” a nonfiction best seller.

He became the first author to deliver a typewritten manuscript — his memoir, “Life on the Mississippi,” published in 1883.

I enjoyed Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” as well as Ernest Hemingway’s writing.