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.

Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain's story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice.Influencing subsequent generations of writers--from Sherwood Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian T.S.Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J.D.Salinger--Huckleberry Finn,like the river that flows through its pages, is one of the great sources that nourished and still nourish the literature of America.

Notice

Explanatory

1.Discover Moses and the Bulrushers

2.Our Gang's Dark Oath

3.We Ambuscade the A-rabs

4.The Hair-ball Oracle

5.Pap Starts In'on a New Life

6.Pap Struggles with the Death Angel

7.I Fool Pap and Get Away

8.I Spare Miss Watson's Jim

9.The House of Death Floats By

10.What Comes of Handlin' Snake-skin

11.They're After Us!

12."Better Let Blame Well Alone"

13.Honest Loot from the "Walter Scott"

14.Was Solomon Wise?

15.Fooling Poor Old Jim

16.The Rattlesnake-skin Does Its Work

17.The Grangerfords Take Me In

18.Why Harney Rode Away for His Hat

19.The Duke and the Dauphin Come Aboard

20.What Royalty Did to Parkville

21.An Arkansaw Difficulty

22.Why the Lynching Bee Failed

23.The Orneriness of Kings

24.The King Turns Parson

25.All Full of Tears and Flapdoodle

26.I Steal the King's Plunder

27.Dead Peter Has His Gold

28.Overreaching Don't Pay

29.I Light Out in the Storm

30.The Gold Saves the Thieves

31.You Can't Pray a Lie

32.I Have a New Name

33.The Pitiful Ending of Royalty

34.We Cheer Up Jim

35.Dark, Deep-Laid Plans

36.Trying to Help Jim

37.Jim Gets His Witch Pie

38."Here a Captive Heart Busted"

39.Tom Writes Nonnamous Letters

40.A Mixed-up and Splendid Rescue

41."Must 'a' Been Sperits"

42.Why They Didn't Hang Jim

Chapter the Last, Nothing More to Write

Afterword