Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain. Part I.

Life on the Mississippi is a semi-autobiographical travelogue by Mark Twain, published in 1883, that encapsulates his personal and artistic world and his turbulent and humorous approach to reality, his penchant for unrestrained structure, and his belief that there is no substitute for experience in the scaffolding of a book.

The story takes as its subject the great Mississippi, whose waters flowed through the author's early years, as an apprentice and later as a steamer pilot, to know all its currents with which he managed to identify as like he were its higher guardian.

The identification of the author with the river, as well as the multiple, powerful and abundant styles that put them together, build little by little the shared myth of the Mississippi and of the writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who became, through a slow process of sublimation of their relationship, Mark Twain. (From Wikipedia).