Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi"

Life on the Mississippi is a big long book that's been talked and written about so much and excerpted so often and at such length you may feel like you're read it even if you haven't and if that's the case you haven't, because there's a lot more. It's divided, roughly, into two parts, first the story of Twain's career as a riverboat pilot and, second, the story of a trip he took much later, after the Civil War, to revisit the cities and the people along its way. Definitely worth a read.