The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn American Classics Edition - (HarperCollins American Classics) by Mark Twain (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"For a hundred years, the argument that this novel is has been identified, reidentified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts." -- Toni Morrison

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. One of the foundational texts in the canon of American literature, Mark Twain's quintessential masterpiece is known for its unflinching exploration of the dangers of prejudice, the struggle to locate--and follow--one's inner moral compass when at odds with society's pressures, and the true meaning of freedom.

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted," Twain wrote to preface his novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

Originally published in 1884, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was met with mixed critical reception and even denounced for "offending propriety." After more than a century of weathering literary, historical, and scholarly rebuke, this novel from America's greatest humorist holds a prominent place in the canon of American literature; Hemingway once wrote that Huckleberry Finn is the novel from which "all modern American literature comes. . . . There has been nothing as good since."

Set in antebellum Missouri and traversing the whole Mississippi River region, Twain's sequel to his picaresque novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer follows Huck as he stages his own death to escape his alcoholic father and sets off on an odyssey marked by comedy, danger, and adventure. He soon encounters Jim, the enslaved man working for Huck's erstwhile guardians, the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson. Jim had run away after overhearing the ladies discuss selling him, and Huck and Jim set sail on a raft down the Mississippi, headed for the Free State of Illinois.

Twain's piquant humor finds full expression in this nineteenth-century literary classic, and Huck's frank, boyish narration, told in the vernacular of his time, offers true merriment. But despite Twain's disavowal, the story's moral center becomes inarguably apparent when Jim is caught and Huck--after one of the most infamous struggles of conscience in American literature--vows to help his friend escape. In Huck Finn, Twain wrote, "a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat." Huck's journey through nature and "sivilization," and what he learns about human nature is as poignant today as in Twain's own time.

Central to the American experience, a staple of classrooms, and a cultural touchstone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offers timeless insights into the transition from childhood to adulthood, cruelty and prejudice, and the human condition itself.

Review Quotes

"Truly an American odyssey. . . . It need not be stressed that Mark Twain re-created a full sense of life on the Mississippi. This is undisputed. He wrote with ease and buoyancy; there is humor, sensibility and beauty in his style. But there is real penetration, too. He evokes an entire epoch, which takes on organic shape, form, solidarity, depth." - The New York Times
"Huckleberry Finn is now read as a key to the very essence of the American imagination, a central document of our most primitive impulses." . . . Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer, quintessential because was more or less untutored--'a natural, ' as Wright Morris puts it, 'who learned to write the way a river pilot learns the feel of a channel.'" - Norman Podhoretz, New York Times, 1959 - Norman Podhoretz (New York Times 1959)
"The best book we've had ... There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." - Ernest Hemingway
"There was in Twain a healthy sense of democratic feelings, a hatred of oppression and injustice, a deep-seated feeling that men were more important than the rags and cloth of the past, the trumpery, the show, the color, the glitter attached to outmoded historic institutions. . . . [Twain] is the literary summation of pioneer America. And in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he distilled and transmuted his material in terms of great writing. . . . Truly an American odyssey. . . . Twain re-created a full sense of life on the Mississippi. . . . He wrote with ease and buoyancy; there is humor, sensibility and beauty in his style. But there is real penetration, too. He evokes an entire epoch, which takes on organic shape, form, solidarity, depth." - New York Times, 1943