The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics)
by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Mark Twain
Brand: Penguin Group USA
Editor: Guy Cardwell
Introduction: John Seelye
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-12-31
ISBN: 0142437174
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780142437179
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics)

Book Review: Huck and Jim's fearful journey "down the river"
Summary: 5 Stars

I can't even say for sure how many times (four? five?) I've read "Huckleberry Finn," but each time I notice something new and admire something different. Having read several biographical accounts of Mark Twain's life in recent years, however, I learned some background that explains an aspect of the book that always puzzled me: how a book that is a sequel to an adventure story for boys seems to be of a different genre entirely.

Many readers come to "Huckleberry Finn" via its predecessor, "Tom Sawyer." Sure enough, the second book opens not long after the first book, and the first chapters of "Huck" resemble the tone and style of "Tom." Twain's initial plan was indeed to write another boyhood adventure story; he began the sequel soon after "Tom Sawyer" was published, and so we read about how Huck's low-life father desires the treasure Tom and Huck found in the previous story, about Huck's escape from his father's cruelty, and about his comical disguises as a girl and as a survivor of a wreck on the river. And then Twain set the work aside when he reached Chapters 15 and 16, in which Huck and Jim take off on their now-famous raft journey.

It was three years before Twain worked on the book again, and by that time he'd decided that "Huck Finn" would not be a simple, episodic adventure tale for children. It took Twain another five years to finish it. During that period he wrote a travel book, "Life on the Mississippi" (in which he included an eventually deleted passage from "Huck Finn"), and you can see its influence on the river adventures of Huck. More significantly, the centrality of Jim to the story transformed the novel into a work on race, slavery, freedom, and life on the frontier--hardly the stuff of children's literature.

This amalgamation explains why the early chapters seem to be written for kids (much like "Tom Sawyer") and why the book still resonates with so many youngsters. It develops into a different book altogether the moment Huck and Jim step on that raft, become fugitives, and eventually head "down the river"-- away from the promise of freedom upstream and toward the territory where the institution of slavery is even more inhumane. (A constant fear among slaves in Twain's later novel "Puddn'head Wilson" is to be sold "down the river.") Huckleberry Finn--both the character and the book--loses the aura of childhood innocence; as a result, Huck's journey is much less like "Tom Sawyer" and more like Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

Summary of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics)

Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Intended at first as a simple story of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley?a sequel to Tom Sawyer?the book grew and matured under Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. More than a century after its publication, the critical debate over the symbolic significance of Huck's and Jim's voyage is still fresh, and it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humor.


@declineofwesternsiv Seems like soon as a fella comes into a bit o? money, everyone comes out of the woodworks after?n it.

These ladies wants to sivilize me? More like reverse gold-dig my fame and fortune. @FencinTom: Get me outta here!

From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less


A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published.

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