Richard Pike Bissell (1913–1977)

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It is the story of a towboat and its crew on a journey up the Mississippi during a flood, where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. I thought that Bissell did a good job of taking characters who are fairly stock: the Kid, the crusty Captain, the Duke - and making them into real characters rather than caricatures. Bissell sprinkles quotes from Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and others into the beginning of each chapter, a nice touch.

Wally Dixon is a clever man, and his boredom with his hum-drum life leads him into a brush with the underworld. For Canadians, there is nothing really about Saskatchewan in this book....it is merely a handy punch line.

A combination of autobiography and steamboating history by the author of the novel which was turned into the very successful 1950's musical "The pajama game". Will appeal to anyone who is fascinated by the 1940's on and off the Mississippi. Born and brought up in Dubuque, Iowa, Mr Bissell, a Harvard graduate, worked alongside the talented pilots, idiosyncratic captains and earthy deckhands of the river boats and has a talent for describing their working and leisure life. He isn't happy about show more Mark Twain's padding of his books, though he isn't above a little of it himself! show less

What makes a man take up a dangerous, dirty, underpaid job as deckhand on a diesel boat pushing barges of coal up and down the Mississippi? Read Richard Bissell's first-hand account and find out - or at least, what the river and the men who worked on it were like sixty years ago. A gripping, funny and serious novel.