Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Including the Omitted, Long, Brilliant Raft Chapter, With the Final "Tom Sawyer" Section, Abridged - Hardcover

Twain, Mark

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9780385232449: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Including the Omitted, Long, Brilliant Raft Chapter, With the Final "Tom Sawyer" Section, Abridged

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385232446 ISBN 13: 9780385232449

Publisher: Doubleday, 1985

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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 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The changes, deletions, and additions that Mark Twain made in the first half of the original manuscript (changes that are larger and more numerous and significant than those he made in the second half) indicate that he frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational work than the book he finally published. He deleted an episode in which whites at a religious camp meeting try to avoid the embraces of a black slave woman - a woman who may think, mistakenly, that she has just been freed. And even in its smallest variations - such as the consistent alteration of vicious rawhide whippings to ordinary cowhide whippings - the original manuscript demonstrates the skill, the restraint, and the constraints that affected Mark Twain's creative process.

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From Publishers Weekly:

In this centenary year of the first American edition of Huckleberry Finn, Neider, who has worked long and well in the thickets of Twain scholarship (this is the ninth Twain volume he has edited), offers a most fitting tribute, for which he will be thanked in some quarters, damned in others. Neider's contribution is twofold: he has restored to its rightful place the great rafting chapter, which the author had lifted from the manuscript-in-progress and dropped into Life on the Mississippi, and he has abridged some of the childish larkiness in the portions in which Huck's friend Tom Sawyer intrudes into this novel. For decades, critics have lamented the absence of the "missing" chapter and deplored the jarring presence of Tom in episodes that slow the narrative, but not until now has anyone had the temerity to set matters right. In paring back the "Tom" chapters (which he fully documents in his lengthy, spirited introduction, with literal line counts of the excised material), Neider has achieved a brisker read. Though there may be some brickbats thrown at him for this "sacrilege," few should object to the belated appearance of the transplanted rafting chapter in the novel in which it clearly belongs. October 25
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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