Old Glory: An American Voyage
| Author | Jonathan Raban |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Picador |
|
Publication date
|
1981 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 15664455 |
Old Glory is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It is the winner of The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
Old Glory describes Raban's voyage down the great Mississippi River in a 16-foot aluminium "Mirrocraft" powered by a 15 h.p. Johnson outboard engine. Inspired by his reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a seven-year-old boy living in Norfolk, in which his local stream is transformed into the Mississippi Valley in his imagination, Raban sets out on his own personal journey thirty years later.
It is in this book that the author develops his own unique writing style (starting to emerge in Arabia Through the Looking Glass), with highly descriptive scenes of the landscape that he passes through, as well as ironic but highly incisive descriptions of the characters he meets along the way. This style is more fully developed in his later travelogues: Coasting (book), Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America and Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings.
Raban's journey starts out in Minneapolis, 200 miles down from the Mississippi's source at Lake Itasca. The author feels a great deal of trepidation when he first takes out his skiff on the water, and has a quick two-hour instruction course from Herb Heichert, the friendly owner of Crystal Marine from whom he borrows the boat. He tells Raban to turn the prow of his boat into the stern wave of the huge passing tugs or towboats working the Mississippi, to watch out for floating logs and to avoid the wing-dams jutting out from the river's banks. After this crash course in river navigation, Raban then has to navigate his way through Lock No. 1, the first of twenty-six huge locks between Minneapolis and St Louis.
...
Wikipedia