Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the only one of Mark Twain's various books which can be called a masterpiece. I do not suggest that it is his only book of permanent interest; but it is the only one in which his genius is completely realized, and the only one which creates its own category.
— T.S.Eliot
Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the archetypical American maverick.
Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "sivilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. The two bind themselves to one another, becoming intimate friends and agreeing "there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
As Huck learns about love, responsibihty, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the only one of Mark Twain's various books which can be called a masterpiece. I do not suggest that it is his only book of permanent interest; but it is the only one in which his genius is completely realized, and the only one which creates its own category.
— T.S.Eliot
Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the archetypical American maverick.
Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "sivilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. The two bind themselves to one another, becoming intimate friends and agreeing "there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
As Huck learns about love, responsibihty, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage through his own soul, culminating in the glorious moment when he decides to "go to hell" rather than return Jim to slavery.
Mark Twain defined classic as "a book which people praise and don't read"; Huckleberry Finn is a happy exception to his own rule. Twain's mastery of dialect, coupled with his famous wit, has made Adventures of Huckleberry Finn one of the most loved and distinctly American classics ever written.



Introduction and Notes by Robert O'Meally

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Nominated for a Grammy for his work as co-producer of the five-CD box set The Jazz Singers (1998), Robert O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University and Director of Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies. He is the principal writer of Seeing Jazz (1997), the catalogue for the Smithsonian's exhibit on jazz and literature, and the co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996).
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30,1835.When Sam was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a small town later immortalized in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1863 Samuel Clemens adopted a pen name, signing a sketch "Mark Twain," and in 1867 Mark Twain won fame with the publication oL a collection of humorous writings. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sltetches. Soon afterwards, he married and settled in Connecticut, dividing his time between writing and lecturing.

Cover Design: Louise Fill Ltd.
> ^ '-'Cover Image: Detail of Boy in Boat from mstphaiia ' by Albert Bierstadt
^ -r^ © Burstein CoUection/CORBIS

/iclventures of HucJcIeLerry Finn
Huck is a "blues-hero," an improviser in a world of trouble who optimistically faces a deadly project without a script. Remember that the blues is not just a confrontation with a world gone wrong; to that gone-wrongness, the blues answers that the instrumentalist-hero (and the community of blues people identifying with the artist's expression) have just enough resiliency and power to keep on keeping on, whatever the changes in fortune.
„—from the Introduction by Robert O'Meally Vissza