Synopsis
A 19th-century boy, floating down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, becomes involved with a feuding family, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt, who mistakes him for Tom.
A young boy living in mid-nineteenth century Missouri relates the many adventures that he and his friend, an escaped slave, experience as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft. Includes explanatory notes throughout the text, an introduction discussing the author and the background of the story, and a study guide.
Twain spent seven years writing HUCKLEBERRY FINN--the book Hemingway claimed is the basis for all American fiction. The story of Huck's and Jim's quest for freedom on a raft on the Mississippi provides a panoramic view of Southern society, which Twain saw as beset by greed, violence, and coldhearted brutality in the guise of virtue. At the end of the book, Huck definitively abandons the hypocrisy and cant on which he has been raised when he makes the shocking decision to go to hell rather than betray his friend Jim and send him back to slavery. The book has been banned from time to time, beginning with its publication in 1885, when it was deemed too subversive for children, until the late 20th century when, despite its compassionate attitude toward blacks and is violent denunciation of slavery, it has been branded racist because of Twain's use of dialect and "offensive" language. In addition to its message of tolerance and understanding, HUCKLEBERRY FINN continues to be read, talked about, and loved by readers of all ages because it's a cracking good coming-of-age story full of vivid characters and hilarious events --and because Twain's relentlessly clear-eyed angle of vision sees beneath the foibles and absurdities of humanity to the common ground that we all share.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2005-11-30 |
| Size | | Length: | 224 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 16.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"'Huckleberry Finn' has never really struggled up out of a continuous vortex of discord, and probably never will, as long as its enchanting central figures, with their confused and incalculable feelings for each other, remain symbols of our own racial confusion."
William Styron (06/26/1995)
"'Huckleberry Finn' is, among other things, a complex, serious book. And it should be taught as such--to children old enough to think and read with imagination. The supposedly racially insensitive tale, with its repeated use of the word 'nigger,' is the most devastating portrait of American white trash and white-trash racism that has ever been written. 'Huck Finn' savages racism as thoroughly as any document in American history...After 'Huckleberry Finn' was published in 1885, the Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, banned the book. As the 'Boston Transcript' reported: 'One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The librarian and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant.'"
Civilization - Lance Morrow
"....We come to see Huck...as one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction; not unworthy to take a place with 'Ulysses', 'Faust', 'Don Quixote', 'Don Juan', 'Hamlet', and other great discoveries that man has made about himself."
T. S. Eliot
"In 1902, the Omaha Public Library banned 'Huckleberry Finn' on the grounds that 'the influence upon the youthful mind is pernicious.' 'The Omaha World Herald' sent Mark Twain a telegram. His response: 'I am tearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm. It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading 'Huck Finn', out of a natural human curiosity to learn what this is all about--people who had not heard of him before; people whose morals will go to wreck and ruin now...The publishers are glad, but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry. I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves that got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you never can tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself."
New York Times Book Review - Mark Twain (09/06/1902)
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'."
advertisement - Ernest Hemingway
"The gigantic amorphousness of our past makes impossible, or merely idle, any attempt to fix in the form of idea the meaning of nationality. But more truly with 'Huckleberry Finn' than with any other book, inquiry may satisfy itself; here is America."
"Mark Twain & America" - Bernard A. De Voto (01/01/1932)
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
Preface - Mark Twain
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