Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Rating:
Summary: The definitive edition of Twain's masterpiece
Review: This book is a must-have for serious readers of Twain's greatest novel, one well worth the expense. Based on his original manuscript, it provides the ur-text of this wonderful work (including the original illustrations), giving readers the opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the full subtlety of the author's labors.

Enhancing the experience is the excellent annotations that the editors provided. While a bit difficult to trace (the editors preferred page-line cites to footnotes, which leaves the text free of supertext clutter), they provide first-rate insight into the details of Clemens's writing and the minutiae of Huck's world. This, along with Clemens's original notes, list of revisions, fascimilies of the original manuscript, and a number of maps of Clemens's Mississippi, make this book an essential addition to the library of any student of this great writer.

Rating:
Summary: Huck Finn's Independence
Review: This is the second time that I have read the book and it was just as good as the first time through. I love the witty dialect Twain throws in to create a southern ambiance of the 19th century. This book was a huge piece of controversy at its time due to the fact a young white boy and a run a way slave team up to sail the Mississippi in seek of adventure. I find the book really interesting and at the same time almost weird, kind of on a Sci-Fi level, with everything involving how the two families kill each other including their children. Today's world is full of people trapped in the routine of society's standards and Huck is a perfect example of what many people want - independence and free spirit. I like how Huck, even though without a proper family oriented upbringing, is able to distinguish from right and wrong. It shows the incredible mental capacity humans have in their ability to reason.

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest version of America's Greatest Book
Review: This review isn't to give a review of one of the most studied works of the English language, but rather to detail what makes this edition special and worthy of purchase.

At the most superficial level Huck is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which had introduced us to these two icons of the printed word. After Tom Sawyer was a big hit the publisher, perhaps understandably, wanted not only a sequel, but one which logically followed Tom Sawyer. They specifically desired for the two works to sit comfortably on a shelf together. Perhaps there was a time when Mark Twain desired the same thing - more of the same crowd pleasing story telling. But I think that perhaps from the beginning he recognized that he now had the audience that he wanted for his masterpiece, so he began writing it.

Even in the form which was familiar for 100 years Huckleberry Finn was widely hailed as the centerpiece of American Literature. THIS edition reveals that the masterpiece as originally conceived was even more masterly.

Clemens wrote the original manuscript and submitted it to the publisher. I don't know what they thought of the book as it was, but one thing was clear: it was a good deal longer than Tom Sawyer and sitting side by side with Tom Sawyer the two books looked less like a "pair".

So.... the editorial pruning process began and enough was removed from the originally conceived Huckleberry Finn to create both the originally published versions of Huck as well as "Life on the Mississippi".

Now we finally get to see the "complete Huck". The missing text flows along with the "original Huck" as mightily as the Mississippi that Huck and Jim ride along in the book of our dreams.

As if that were enough, we also are treated to original illustrations and facsimile reproductions of several of Twain's original text. I found these pages among the most enlightening of all. Almost as if he knew his handwritten pages would be looked at by posterity, Twain used a unique revision technique. Rather than erasing a word or passage he wishes to replace, he would instead line through the words in a single line, leaving the replaced word legible along with the words which would replace the revised word. By examining these hand-written lines we can see how meticulous Twain was in his word selection. In several of the passages he made slight corrections which were plainly intended to make the runaway slave, Jim, as noble as possible. It has long been a curiosity to me that this book, frequently criticized as "racist", has as it's two central characters a runaway slave and the "poor white trash" boy who decides to help him. At one point Huck is memorably torn between what the Southern Society he has been raised in says is right and what gnaws at his conscience. It is obviously an unqualified truth to Huck that Jim is uneducated and so poor that he doesn't even own himself, yet Jim possesses more humanity than any of the "civilized" southerners Huck meets. Seeing Clemens' own scrawl lets us see how diligently Clemens worked to make that distinction clear - that Jim is easily the most noble adult in the book.

I agree with Mr. Hemingway - Huckleberry Finn IS America's greatest novel. Thanks to rediscovering Twain's original text (and an entertaining sequence of events which is detailed in the introduction to this edition) we finally get to read America's greatest Novel the way that the author originally intended.

I cannot recommend this highly enough.