Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Paperback

by Mark Twain (Author), George Saunders (Introduction by)

Introduction by George Saunders
Commentary by Thomas Perry Sergeant, Bernard DeVoto, Clifton Fadiman, T. S. Eliot, and Leo Marx

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote. "It's the best book we've had." A complex masterpiece that spawned controversy right from the start (it was banished from the Concord library shelves in 1885), it is at heart a compelling adventure story. Huck, in flight from his murderous father, and Jim, in flight from slavery, pilot their raft through treacherous waters, surviving a crash with a steamboat and betrayal by rogues. As Norman Mailer has said, "The mark of how good Huckleberry Finn has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page."

Front Jacket

'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn, ' Ernest Hemingway wrote. 'It's the best book we've had.' A complex masterpiece that has spawned volumes of scholarly exegesis and interpretative theories, it is at heart a compelling adventure story. Huck, in flight from his murderous father, and Nigger Jim, in flight from slavery, pilot their raft thrillingly through treacherous waters, surviving a crash with a steamboat, betrayal by rogues, and the final threat from the bourgeoisie. Informing all this is the presence of the River, described in palpable detail by Mark Twain, the former steamboat pilot, who transforms it into a richly metaphoric entity. Twain's other great innovation was the language of the book itself, which is expressive in a completely original way. 'The invention of this language, with all its implications, gave a new dimension to our literature, ' Robert Penn Warren noted. 'It is a language capable of poetry.'

"From the eBook edition.

Author Biography

George Saunders, who was chosen in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers age forty and under, is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.