Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells the story of a teenaged misfit who finds himself floating on a raft down the Mississippi River with an escaping slave, Jim. In the course of their perilous journey, Huck and Jim meet adventure, danger, and a cast of characters who are sometimes menacing and often hilarious. Though some of the situations in Huckleberry Finn are funny in themselves (the cockeyed Shakespeare production in Chapter 21 leaps instantly to mind), this book's humor is found mostly in Huck's unique worldview and his way of expressing himself. Describing his brief sojourn with the Widow Douglas after she adopts him, Huck says: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." Underlying Twain's good humor is a dark subcurrent of Antebellum cruelty and injustice that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a frequently funny book with a serious message.
Product Description
This is a large (6"x9"), top-quality new edition of Mark Twain's masterpiece. Complete and unabridged. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It's the best book we've had. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." -Ernest Hemingway
Book Description
Cambridge Literature is a series of literary texts edited for study by students aged 14-18 in English-speaking classrooms. It will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, travel-writing and other non-fiction. The series will be extensive and open-ended and will provide school students with a range of edited texts taken from a wide geographical spread.
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 ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain December 16, 2008
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, originally published in 1884. It is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Ernest Hemingway (and many others) called it the greatest American novel ever. Huck Finn picks up right where Tom Sawyer left off - Huck's abusive father appears to lay claim to Huck's fortune, so Huck fakes his own death and goes down the Mississippi River with Jim, the escaped slave.
Much like Tom Sawyer, there's not a lot of plot going on here most of the time, and that's okay, because Twain's writing is extremely entertaining. Twain has a good old time mocking social conventions, and the novel is gripping almost all the way through. Hemingway was right: the end of Huck Finn is poor. After Jim is abducted and Tom Sawyer reappears, things just get silly, not to mention highly convenient (And Tom Sawyer here is just as immature as he ever was, reinforcing that no real maturation occurred in Tom Sawyer, and that that book really isn't a coming-of-age story in the truest sense).
Twain has made Huck the narrator. On the whole, this works, although it gets tiresome to read Huck's dialect sometimes. Twain-as-narrator is definitely missed here. Nobody could write a clever sentence like Twain, and most of that is lost here, although occasionally Huck will turn one (and by doing so break character, but that's the price you pay).
Huck Finn has been exceedingly controversial because of the extensive use of the n-word. So is the novel racist? Certainly the characters have the racism of the day ingrained in them - in that sense, it is racist. But more important to most people is whether Twain was racist; that is, whether he put his own personal racism in the book. That is harder to determine, especially since Twain has made Huck the narrator. Perhaps the fairest thing to say is that Twain was genuinely criticizing racism, but the way in which he portrayed Jim and the other characters contains some residual racism of its own.
So is Huck Finn America's greatest novel? Well, maybe not. But it's definitely up there.
Well it made me a happy boy December 12, 2008
I was down in the dumps I was. Wonderin' when my Huck Finn would come, and wonderin' if it would be righ' on time. But it was, I tell you, it was.
 Twain: From Great to Just Good December 9, 2008
"Ambivalence" is the word that comes to mind when discussing this, Twain's supposed masterpiece, and the term that also comes to mind when considering the state of race relations among the leading thinkers in our nation during most of its history. Twain published "Huckleberry Finn" past the halfway point in this time line, and it stands as a fascinating monument to how even "enlightened" leaders viewed the race question at the cusp of the 20th Century.
Twain's work continues to be heralded for its descriptive prose and rendering of river life, for its spot-on use of dialect and its clever plot and dialogue; but in the end, all that matters is the author's treatment of the race question.
Like Huck, Twain began life in a lower-middle class, slaveowning family, and like Huck, the author slowly grew less tolerant of overt racism. That sort of almost grudging transformation is on full display in this epic work, and for most of it, we take our own grudging, yet sympathetic view of Huck and Twain. After all, we ask, would it be fair to judge 19th Century morality through the prism of 21st Century democracy?
That laissez-faire approach by the reader comes to a crashing halt, however, when we realize that we have been led "down the river" by Twain through his boyhood alter ego, Tom Sawyer, who - like so many of his time (and even like some of us today) - find a million rationales as to why the black man must undergo additional inconvenience to suit the white man's whims. Tom is the 19th Century Everyman who finds every excuse in the book not to release Jim until he is forced to admit publicly that this former piece of property has already been set free legally. And so, for the final one-fifth of the book, we are made to watch Jim surrender to Tom and Huck's nonsensical games, thwarting what had been the almost inexorable progression of a moralistic plot line, and disappointing this reader to no end.
In twisting what a vast majority of readers expect and are waiting for, Samuel Clemens may be making clear what he felt about some of the tougher, racially-tinged exchanges in his book. Those passages could have been construed as the author's surreptitious way of commenting on the racism of his time, but that argument begins to collapse as the moral imperative of Twain's plot crumbles.
In the end, no amount of adoration for Twain's wonderful caricatures of bumpkins and hoboes or for passing moments of hilarity can compensate for the disappointing conclusion to this "beloved" book. Like Jefferson, who said all men are created equal but who, unlike Washington, simply could not bring himself to free his slaves, Twain paints a narrative of gradualism - ultimately, not through Huck Finn, but through his majoritarian stand-in, Tom Sawyer - and Twain seems content with it.
A major bonus of this 2001 Modern Library Classics edition is the thought-provoking introductory essay by George Saunders of Syracuse University and the collection of shorter, back-of-the-book commentaries, which in their own way clearly demonstrate the slow evolution of race relations in our country.
It is ironic, and indeed somewhat fitting, that the cover testimonial for this edition comes from H.L. Mencken, who hails "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as "One of the great masterpieces of the world." As someone who derided the "booboisie" and evidenced a streak of intolerance in his own public utterances, perhaps the choice of this particular endorsement is more fitting that one might realize.
Read this work by Twain as a compelling historical record first - and if you can stand to, as an "entertainment" second.
Great book! When addressing controversy think of context. November 13, 2008
I can't say more on the plot because it's quite obvious what the plot is just from illustrations of the novel. But on the "controversial" aspect of the novel involving the excessive use of the N word, people have to think of the time period that Twain is writing about and when the novel was published.
The novel takes place in Missouri (a slave border state) in the 1830s. We use the term African-American or black now. Before that it was Afro-Americans, coloreds, Negr--s. The list goes on and on. The overall attitude was that as the terms changed the previous one was seen as more offensive than the progressive current one. Yes, that meant there was a time when the word "colored" was used by people who considered themselves progressive in terms of racial attitudes. But in the Antebellum South the use of the N word was thrown around quite easily. And persons added positive as well as negative adjectives to it. It's strange to imagine that. We today only think of it in a totally negative way. But even when Twain published the novel in the 1880s the word was unfortunately not yet out of fashion.
Also consider the way Twain writes of Jim, the runaway slave. While the knee-jerk reaction is that Jim is a total vaudevillian caricature of what the perception was of blacks in the Antebellum South, his relationship with Huck Finn was something to be viewed as progressive. Remember that a decade before the novel came out; Reconstruction was over and left things a mess in terms of race relations. There was a lot of bitterness in the South over the Civil War (probably the most destructive war at the time until WWI), and a whole generation of southern white men took it personally when they were expected to be on the same level in terms of voting rights and other things with men that was formerly human property. For us today "all men are created equal" is a statement of truth provided we all have a level playing field. But for many southern whites at the time this was hard to swallow. In an aristocratic agrarian society, some men are just superior to others. And in the Antebellum South, just below poor whites were blacks. This was the way things were in their society for over two hundred years and the Civil War didn't suddenly end that sentiment among the many. But for Twain to write of a kind of comradeship between a slave and a young white boy was definitely progressive.
Maybe Twain was hoping to reach a young generation raised by their bitter parents and discover that they could have friendships with blacks and not succumb to an entrenching separatist animosity that developed into the Jim Crow Era. Huck and Jim work together in schemes and have fun. This friendship (which is why Huck decides to do what he does on the journey) is what Twain emphasized in the journey down river. This was counter to the way whites were acting with and around blacks at the time (1880s).
I think it's clear based on a certain reading of the novel that Twain believed whites and blacks could and should get along. While today it may not be seen as "progressive", it was when it was first published.
Finn & Sawyer Part 2 November 2, 2008
Everyone should read or re-read this classic. Most of us read it in school, probabaly not in its entirety. Schools struggled then and now with the use of the N word, although teenage boys in the 1830's clearly would never have heard a synonym.
These adventures are a classic. The royals were a hoot, how many failed fraudulent enterprises could they invent before the inevitable tar and feathering. Huck and Jim are on the run from an abusive father and the law, respectively, and Twain shows all people have a great deal in common, in spite of theories prevalent in the antebellum era.
I'm not sure why Tom Sawyer needs to show up to conclude this thing. The ending could work without him, maybe Twain not sure that Finn could carry the book or film alone.
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