Synopses & Reviews
This beautiful edition presents one of the best-loved classics of children's literature. Mark Twain's classic tale of Huck and Jim's travels down the Mississippi River is a favorite for both children and adults alike. This volume includes Edward W. Kemble's charming black and white drawings from the first edition, published in 1884.
Synopsis
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn, Ernest Hemingway wrote, It's the best book we've had. A complex masterpiece that has spawned volumes of scholarly exegesis and interpretative theories, it is at heart a compelling adventure story. Huck, in flight from his murderous father, and Nigger Jim, in flight from slavery, pilot their raft thrillingly through treacherous waters, surviving a crash with a steamboat, betrayal by rogues, and the final threat from the bourgeoisie. Informing all this is the presence of the River, described in palpable detail by Mark Twain, the former steamboat pilot, who transforms it into a richly metaphoric entity. Twain's other great innovation was the language of the book itself, which is expressive in a completely original way. The invention of this language, with all its implications, gave a new dimension to our literature, Robert Penn Warren noted. It is a language capable of poetry.
Synopsis
This beautiful edition presents one of the best-loved classics of children's literature. Mark Twain's classic tale of Huck and Jim's travels down the Mississippi River is a favorite for both children and adults alike. This volume includes Edward W. Kemble's charming black and white drawings from the first edition, published in 1884.
About the Author
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of the most exciting and adventuresome of literary lives. Raised in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age twelve to seek work. He was successfully a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier (for a few weeks), and a prospector, miner, a reporter in the western territories. With the publication in 1865 of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist, and with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1855), he was acknowledged by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce.