Paul Schneider’s exploration of America’s great waterway takes the reader from the Mississippi River’s origins to its polluted present. Tracing its prehistory, geology, anthropology, and cultural and literary histories, Old Man River is as vast as its subject.

The facinating cast of characters includes the French and Spanish explorers, Desoto, Marquette, and Juliet, the incomparable La Salle; George Washington fighting his first battle in an effort to secure the watershed; the birth of jazz and blues; literary greats like Melville, Dickens, Trollope, and, of course, Mark Twain.

Pirates and riverbats, gamblers and slaves, hustlers and landscape painters, loggers and catfishers, tourists and missionaries: It is a river of stories and myth. It’s Paul Robeson sitting on a cotton bale, Daniel Boon floating on a flatboat, and Paul Bunyan cutting trees in the neighborhood of Little House in the Big Woods.

Half devastated product of American ingenuity, half magnificent natural wonder, it is impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi.