A Stretch On the River

A Mississippi river yarn told by novelist and playwright, Richard Bissell. Although Harvard educated, Bissell worked on the Mississippi most of his life and from the very first page, A Stretch on the River (1950) sweeps the reader along much like the river that runs through it – burbling and chortling, making us laugh, and creating wonder. 

The narrator joins the crew of a Mississippi towboat at the beginning of WW II having been refused by the Navy (and having no use for the army) and is soon immersed in his job and in the lives of Shorty and Diamond and Joe. Work for the crew is brutal, but there is time for trips ashore, hard drinking, good eating, falling in love (meet Toots and Merle), solving problems of the world, and pausing long enough to wonder why in the heck they are doing this. Bissell tells it like it is. This is how they talked, this is how they lived; and sometimes, eloquently and tenderly, this is how they died. Unerringly and with great authenticity, Bissell tells the story of the river and why it grips the men who love it.

“At first I stayed [on the river] out of stubbornness.Then I began to forget I had lived any other way. Then I began to feel sorry for the people on the bank.When I got that far I was a river man. (Herb,ch 3, p.1)

A wonderful book by a treasured American author.