Dear Twainiacs,

Whenever I teach "Old Times on the Mississippi," I am invariably
presented with a paper on "the Mississippi River as a character" in the
text--it's seldom a very good paper, but the idea seems to have
incredible currency among undergraduates. A quick internet search
reveals several sites that refer to "many people" having said that the
river is like a character, but it seems to me that I once possessed a
citation to an essay on that subject written many years ago; I can find
no record of it now. Does anyone out there know where this interest in
the river as a "character" originated? Of course, Mark Twain, himself,
refers to the river as being like a book and there is the wonderful
allusion to a pilot's reading the river as comparable to a doctor's
being able to read disease in the flush of beauty's cheek, but I don't
recall that Mark Twain himself described the river as a character--at
least not in "Old Times."

Many thanks,
Barbara