Powers traces the meandering course of Twain's decidedly uninnocent youth, marked by the loss of siblings, murderous violence and his father's bankruptcy and early death. There is the "floating dream-atmosphere" of the slave quarters on his uncle's farm, an atmosphere charged with voices that were a luscious hybrid of languages. These voices summoned images of talking animals, magic spells, ghosts and slave auctions, and lead directly to the tidal cadences of Twain's great character Jim.

There is his attendance at minstrel shows and exhibitions of "mesmerism" in which young "Sammy" enthusiastically became "the most-mesmerized kid in the history of fake enchantment." And there is the brooding sense of guilt and fear of eternal damnation inculcated into him at church where the Presbyterian minister spun feverish, apocalyptic images of an implacable God. Mark Twain was shaped by all these streams, by the very landscape, culture and people of Hannibal, Missouri.

A native of Hannibal himself, Powers is uniquely qualified to write of that town whose "dangerous waters" of sorrowing experience Mark Twain learned to navigate and conjure into the humorous stories that transformed American literature.