One of the greats...perhaps THE great...American novel...
It is one of the most loved, most reviled, and most
controversial American works of fiction.
It has been trashed by "race hustlers" looking for publicity, it's
been banned by schools for language, but significant as the first novel to use
regional vernacular in telling the story, Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn is far and away Twain's most famous and infamous book.
A continuation of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer published a decade earlier, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was Twain's reentry into
storytelling...and it stands as his most enduring and influential work. Huck Finn portrays speech as it would
actually be heard...the Southern way of speaking...and it's the first novel to
do so. It can be vulgar...it uses the
word nigger...but it's also a scathing commentary on Black slavery and the
contemporary racist treatment of Blacks in Gilded Age America.
From the first appearance of this masterpiece, it has been
highly controversial. It shook up
Victorian ideas of propriety...and gone on to be banned from American schools
and libraries (not to mention foreign attempts to keep it away from eager
readers) and has been the victim of contemporary censorship with modern day
editors being changed in text and wording...all in the name of
political-correctness.
The First American Edition...1885 (The Canadian and English
first editions came in 1884)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn