Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Descripción editorial
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an American classic, a book that has inspired troves of writers in its wake, and that has sparked generations of discussion and debate. It is a novel by Mark Twain noted for its depiction of people and locations along the Mississippi River. One of the first major American novels to employ vernacular English, Adventure of Huckleberry Finn offers a satire on Southern Antebelleum society, particularly regarding attitudes of racism. Told in the first person by protagonist Huckleberry Finn, the book is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This Essential Classics edition includes a new introduction by Professor Vivian Heller, Ph.D. in literature and modern studies from Yale University.
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Raised in Missouri, Twain gained prominence for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter known as a Great American Novel.
Vivian Heller received her Ph.D. in English Literature and Modern Studies from Yale University. She is author of Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation(University of Illinois Press) and of The City Beneath Us (W.W. Norton & Company), a history of the building of the New York City subway system. She is an associate at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and is the writing tutor for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She is also a long-standing member of the non-fiction committee of the PEN Prison-Writing Committee, which awards prizes to inmates from across the country.
Essential Classics publishes the most crucial literary works throughout history, with a unique introduction to each, making them the perfect treasure for any reader’s shelf.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an American classic, a book that has inspired troves of writers in its wake, and that has sparked generations of discussion and debate. It is a novel by Mark Twain noted for its depiction of people and locations along the Mississippi River. One of the first major American novels to employ vernacular English, Adventure of Huckleberry Finn offers a satire on Southern Antebelleum society, particularly regarding attitudes of racism. Told in the first person by protagonist Huckleberry Finn, the book is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This Essential Classics edition includes a new introduction by Professor Vivian Heller, Ph.D. in literature and modern studies from Yale University.
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Raised in Missouri, Twain gained prominence for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter known as a Great American Novel.
Vivian Heller received her Ph.D. in English Literature and Modern Studies from Yale University. She is author of Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation(University of Illinois Press) and of The City Beneath Us (W.W. Norton & Company), a history of the building of the New York City subway system. She is an associate at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and is the writing tutor for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She is also a long-standing member of the non-fiction committee of the PEN Prison-Writing Committee, which awards prizes to inmates from across the country.
Essential Classics publishes the most crucial literary works throughout history, with a unique introduction to each, making them the perfect treasure for any reader’s shelf.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this centenary year of the first American edition of Huckleberry Finn, Neider, who has worked long and well in the thickets of Twain scholarship (this is the ninth Twain volume he has edited), offers a most fitting tribute, for which he will be thanked in some quarters, damned in others. Neider's contribution is twofold: he has restored to its rightful place the great rafting chapter, which the author had lifted from the manuscript-in-progress and dropped into Life on the Mississippi, and he has abridged some of the childish larkiness in the portions in which Huck's friend Tom Sawyer intrudes into this novel. For decades, critics have lamented the absence of the "missing'' chapter and deplored the jarring presence of Tom in episodes that slow the narrative, but not until now has anyone had the temerity to set matters right. In paring back the ``Tom'' chapters (which he fully documents in his lengthy, spirited introduction, with literal line counts of the excised material), Neider has achieved a brisker read. Though there may be some brickbats thrown at him for this ``sacrilege,'' few should object to the belated appearance of the transplanted rafting chapter in the novel in which it clearly belongs. October 25
