The River Queen

This story of a middle-aged woman’s odyssey down the Mississippi River is a funny, beautifully written, and poignant tale of a journey that transforms a life.

In the fall of 2005 acclaimed writer Mary Morris set off down the Mississippi River in a battered old houseboat called The River Queen, with two river rats named Tom and Jerry and an ailing, irascible rat terrier named Samantha Jean. Her father had just died. Her daughter had gone off to college. Lost and uncertain, Morris returned to the river of her youth, to the waterside towns where her father had once lived. In this poignant and often humorous memoir, Morris reclaims the world of her childhood as she gets a bearing on her future. She describes traveling down stream through the Midwest, living like a pirate as she survives a tornado and infestation of mayflies, bivouacs on beaches, and ties up to paddleboats in the dark of night. As she learns to pilot the River Queen through these fabled waters, Morris delivers a memoir that “deserves to be both a best-seller and a classic” (The Courier-Journal).

Author Biography

Mary Morris is a novelist, short-story writer, and author of travel literature. Her many books include the novels Crossroads, The Waiting Room, and The Night Sky. She wrote the travel memoirs Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Artists Public Service Awards. She lives in Brooklyn.