author
George H. Devol
1829–1903
A famously candid memoirist, this 19th-century riverboat gambler turned decades of hustling on the Mississippi into one of the liveliest firsthand accounts of frontier gambling. His writing is rough, colorful, and packed with stories of steamboats, card tricks, and close calls.
1 Audiobook
Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi
by George H. Devol
About the author
Best known for Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, he wrote from hard experience rather than literary polish. Sources consistently describe him as a professional riverboat gambler born in Marietta, Ohio, in 1829, who spent much of his life working the Mississippi and later the rail lines of the American West.
His memoir made him memorable not because it excuses his life, but because it recounts it so directly. He presents the world of steamboats, crooked games, and restless travel in vivid detail, giving modern readers a rare first-person glimpse of gambling culture in 19th-century America.
He died in 1903. Though not a conventional man of letters, he left behind a memoir that has endured as an unusual piece of American life writing.