The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
480
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
480Hardcover
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Overview
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or Mark Twain, as he was better known was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. His father ran a dry goods and grocery store, practiced law and involved himself in local politics after the family's move to Hannibal, Missouri, when Sam was four years old.
Hannibal seems to have been a good place for a boy to grow up. Sam was entranced by the Mississippi River and enjoyed both the barges and the people who traveled on them. When Sam was just eleven his father died and Sam went to work for his brother at the Hannibal Journal first as a printer's apprentice and later a compositor. While still in his teens Sam went on the road as an itinerant printer. In 1857 he conceived a plan to seek his fortune in South America but on the way he met a steamboat captain, Horace Bixby who took him on as a cub riverboat pilot and taught him until he acquired his own license.
This enjoyable style of life, which Twain always spoke of later with special warmth was ended by the Civil War. Twain went west with his brother Orion to prospect in Nevada but in 1862 joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, a paper to which he had already begun submitting his work. Later Twain went to California and submitted "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" to the New York Saturday Press.
By 1871 Twain had published Innocents Abroad and had married Olivia Langdon, the sister of a friend from a socially prominent New York City family. He and his wife moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where they made their family home for thenext 20 years.
Books that he wrote in Hartford confirmed his popular reputation but despite their success Twain found himself in financial difficulty primarily because of his investments in the Paige typesetting business as well as his own publishing company. Eventually Twain was forced to declare bankruptcy.
Twain's last major books were successful commercially but they also reflect his increasing pessimism. His satire becomes at times more biting and mean-spirited than it is humorous. Despite the downturn in Twain's outlook in later life and despite the unevenness of much of his work, he remains one of the major writers of the American nineteenth century, and one who has been enormously influential on subsequent writers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780141334844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Young Readers Group |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2010 |
| Series: | Puffin Classics |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 7.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 10 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
November 30, 1835Date of Death:
April 21, 1910Place of Birth:
Florida, MissouriPlace of Death:
Redding, ConnecticutRead an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Mark Twain.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Young Readers Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Why Study Critical Controversies?PART I. MARK TWAIN AND ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
The Life of Samuel Clemens and the Reception of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The 1885 Text
A Portfolio of Illustrations from the 1885 Edition
PART II. A CASE STUDY IN CRITICAL CONTROVERSY
The Controversy over the Ending: Did Mark Twain Sell Jim Down the River?
Lionel Trilling, A Certain Formal Aptness
T.S. Eliot, The Boy and the River: Without Beginning or End
Leo Marx, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn
James M. Cox, Attacks on the Ending and Twain's Attack on Conscience
Jane Smiley, from Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Twain's "Masterpiece"
Seymour Chwast, Selling Huck Down the River
The Controversy over Race: Does Huckleberry Finn Combat or Reinforce Racist Attitudes?
Julius Lester, Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Justin Kaplan, Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn
Peaches Henry, The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry Finn
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, from Lighting Out for the Territory
Gerry Brenner, More than a Reader's Response: A Letter to "De Ole True Huck"
James Phelan, On the Nature and Status of Covert Texts: A Reply to
Gerry Brenner's "Letter to ‘De Ole True Huck'"
Jonathan Arac, from Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target
Toni Morrison, On Reading Huckleberry Finn
Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua, from The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn
The Controversy over Gender and Sexuality: Are Twain's Sexual Politics Progressive, Regressive, or Beside the Point?
Nancy A. Walker, Reformers and Young Maidens: Women and Virtue in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Myra Jehlen, Reading Gender in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Frederick Crews, Walker versus Jehlen versus Twain
Martha Woodmansee, A Response to Frederick Crews
Appendix: How to Argue about Huckleberry Finn
What People are Saying About This
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
"Although he does an expert job with the entire cast, [narrator William] Dufris's delivery of Jim's dialogue is his crowning achievement. . . . Jim's mind and heart come shining through." —-Publishers Weekly Audio Review
...We come to see Huck... as one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction; not unworthy to tak e a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet, and other great discoveries that man has made about himself.
One can read it at ten and then annually ever after, and each year find that it is as fresh as the year before...
Reading Group Guide
1. Critics have long disagreed about exactly what role Jim plays in Huckleberry Finn. Some have claimed, for example, that his purpose is solely to provide Huck with the opportunity for moral growth, while others have argued that he is a surrogate father figure to Huck. What do you think is Jim's role in the novel?
2. The ending of Huckleberry Finn has been the source of endless critical controveryse. Though no less than T. S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling defended the ending on the grounds that it is structurally coherent ("It is right, " Eliot stated, "that the mood of the book should bring us back to the beginning"), many critics feel that the return of Tom Sawyer and his elaborate scheme for Jim's escape reduces what had been a serious quest for freedom to a silly farce. Bernard de Voto wrote, "In the whole reach of the English novel there is no more aburpt or more abrupt or chilling descent." How does the ending strike you?
3. The Mississippi can be considered a character in its own right in Huckleberry Finn. Discuss the role of the river in the novel.
4. How do humor and satire function in the book?
5. Critic William Manierre argued in a 1964-65 essay that "Huck's 'moral growth' has... been vastly overestimated, " noting for example, that when his conscience begins to give him trouble, he decides he will "do whichever came handiest at the time, " and that while Huck can be seen to achieve a kind of moral grandeur when he tears up the note he's written to Miss Watson, that achievement is underminded by his easy acceptance of Tom Sawyer's scheme in the last ten chapters. Do you agree ordisagree?
6. In "The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn, " Lionel Trilling stated that the style of the book is "not less than definitive in American literature, " and Louis Budd has noted that "today it is standard academic wisdom that Twain's precedent-setting achievement is Huck's language." Discuss the effect of Twain's use of colloquial speech and dialect in the novel.
Foreword
1. Critics have long disagreed about exactly what role Jim plays in Huckleberry Finn. Some have claimed, for example, that his purpose is solely to provide Huck with the opportunity for moral growth, while others have argued that he is a surrogate father figure to Huck. What do you think is Jim's role in the novel?
2. The ending of Huckleberry Finn has been the source of endless critical controveryse. Though no less than T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling defended the ending on the grounds that it is structurally coherent ("It is right," Eliot stated, "that the mood of the book should bring us back to the beginning"), many critics feel that the return of Tom Sawyer and his elaborate scheme for Jim's escape reduces what had been a serious quest for freedom to a silly farce. Bernard de Voto wrote, "In the whole reach of the English novel there is no more aburpt or more abrupt or chilling descent." How does the ending strike you?
3. The Mississippi can be considered a character in its own right in Huckleberry Finn. Discuss the role of the river in the novel.
4. How do humor and satire function in the book?
5. Critic William Manierre argued in a 1964-65 essay that "Huck's 'moral growth' has...been vastly overestimated," noting for example, that when his conscience begins to give him trouble, he decides he will "do whichever came handiest at the time," and that while Huck can be seen to achieve a kind of moral grandeur when he tears up the note he's written to Miss Watson, that achievement is underminded by his easy acceptance of Tom Sawyer's scheme in the last ten chapters. Do you agree ordisagree?
6. In "The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn," Lionel Trilling stated that the style of the book is "not less than definitive in American literature," and Louis Budd has noted that "today it is standard academic wisdom that Twain's precedent-setting achievement is Huck's language." Discuss the effect of Twain's use of colloquial speech and dialect in the novel.