The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Description

'The perfect novel' Kate Atkinson 'The perfect novel' Kate Atkinson, #1 bestselling author of Big Sky Huck is a young, naive white boy fleeing from his drunken, dangerous Pap, and Jim is a runaway slave longing to be reunited with his family. Flung together by circumstance, they journey down the Mississippi together on a log raft, each in search of his own definition of freedom. Their daring adventures along the way provide both entertainment and a satirical look at the moral values of the Deep South of the 1800s.

Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born on 30 November 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Twain worked first as a printer and then as a pilot on Mississippi steamboats. The name Mark Twain is a phrase used on riverboats to indicate that the water is two fathoms deep. Twain later worked as a prospector, a journalist and a publisher. Twain wrote many books but his most famous works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He is also well known as the author of The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Twain moved around a great deal during his life and lived in Europe for some years. He finally settled near Redding in Connecticut where he died on 21 April 1910.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn...There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since -- Ernest Hemingway The quintessential American novel * Guardian * It is Huck who gives the book style. The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.... Thus the River makes the book a great book... Mark Twain is a native, and the River God is his God -- T.S. Eliot The invention of this language, with all its implications, gave a new dimension to our literature. It is a language capable of poetry -- Robert Penn Warren Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave * San Francisco Chronicle *