Author Talk, Reception, and Book Signing - Rinker Buck

Rinker Buck’s Life on the Mississippi

The Madison Public Library will host bestselling author Rinker Buck. Beginning at 5:30 p.m., the evening at the Library will include a reception with light refreshments and will end with a Q & A session. Following the presentation at the Library, guests are invited to a book-signing at program partner Crafted Coffee, 329 West Main Street, with on-site book sales provided by Village Lights Bookstore.

Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Rinker Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand “flatboat era” of the 1800s and sails it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, illuminating the forgotten past of Anna and Harlan Hubbard’s shanty boat trip and America’s first western frontier.

Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early sails it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era.

With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a muscular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.

Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his work has won the PEN New England Award, the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail, Flight of Passage, and First Job. He lives in Tennessee.