The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099511118 ISBN 13: 9780099511113

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2007

Synopsis

Huck is a young, naive white boy fleeing from his drunken, dangerous Pap, and Jim is a runaway slave longing to be reunited with his family. Flung together by circumstance, they journey down the Mississippi together on a log raft, each in search of his own definition of freedom. Their daring adventures along the way provide both entertainment and a satirical look at the moral values of the Deep South of the 1800s.

About this title

Review:

A seminal work of American literature that still commands deep praise and elicits controversy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought to be lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a fuller understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published.

Review:

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn...There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since" (Ernest Hemingway)

"The quintessential American novel" (Guardian)

"It is Huck who gives the book style. The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.... Thus the River makes the book a great book... Mark Twain is a native, and the River God is his God" (T.S. Eliot)

"The invention of this language, with all its implications, gave a new dimension to our literature. It is a language capable of poetry" (Robert Penn Warren)

"Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave" (San Francisco Chronicle)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0099511118
• ISBN 13: 9780099511113
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336