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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain

Series: Tom Sawyer (2)

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English (165)  Dutch (1)  Swedish (1)  German (1)  All languages (168)
Showing 1-5 of 165 (next | show all)
This is slightly better than The Adventures of Mark Twain. Still, I think Mr. Twain isn't all that great. ( )
  Anagarika | Nov 3, 2009 |
This book is writeen by Mark Twain, who write Tom Sawyer.
The main character of this book is Huckleberry Finn who don't like wear new clothes and be good all time.
One day, his father take him away to live in the woods. HIs father isn't very good father, so he hit son.And Huckleberry decided to escape him.
I can't understand this book very much, but I think that true friendship is very important to life. ( )
  zyabuko | Oct 22, 2009 |
I believe that the Notice provided at the very onset of the book (Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.) pretty much sums of the book.

I did not find a motive, a moral, nor a plot but nevertheless found the book somewhat enjoyable. I kept wanting the book to get where it was going, only to remind myself that it wasn't going anywhere and like a raft on the Mississippi I was just going to have to sit back and enjoy the ride.

I cringed at the racism in the book, but understood that's just the way it was back then and was fascinated by how people could have once (and sadly some still) think the way they did.

Overall the book was just too slow-paced for me, but I found myself several times thinking that I needed (and should have previously) read Tom Sawyer. ( )
  she_climber | Oct 8, 2009 |
Of all possible endings for 'Huckleberry Finn,' only one would have made any sense. My own, uneducated guess is that Mark Twain didn't want (or didn't have the courage) to go that way, so he tacked on a resolution clapped together from maudlin slop and preposterous coincidence. When I put my mean eye on 'Huck Finn,' I can literally see where the fix was thrown in. It couldn't be clearer had the author drawn a line across the page at the end of Chapter 31.

Thus what might have been one of the world's great tragedies became one of the world's great pieces of kiddie lit. The world declares it so and so it will remain, which is some consolation because the book as Twain published it is a tragedy of a sort.

The world needs kiddie lit, whether adults enjoy it or not. That's why 'Huckleberry Finn' will outlast ten thousand writers like me. It will survive all attempts to pry it out of its place in the canon and future generations will have to suffer that awful resolution just as I did. Most people don't notice anything wrong with it, anyway.

The upshot is that 'Huckleberry Finn' is eternal: it is a thing that will be with us always, like warfare or venereal disease. And if (unlike most Americans) you've read all of Mark Twain, you know the old geezer would have chortled at and cherished that thought.

When I was a lad of nine years, I'd have rated 'Huckleberry Finn' at six stars, my logic then being that five were not enough. Today, 61 years old, getting on toward the end of a hard life, I give it three stars for the three quarters of the book that are truly superb. The rest of it is goo. ( )
  dekesolomon | Sep 27, 2009 |
Really enjoyed reading this after tackling a couple of George Eliot classics this was a nice break. I haven't laughed out loud to many books but this one got me eventually. Capable readers from age 11 or so would enjoy it (not that I've managed to convince any to finish it). ( )
  caz4562000 | Sep 25, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 165 (next | show all)
Mark Twain may be called the Edison of our literature. There is no limit to his inventive genius, and the best proof of its range and originality is found in this book, in which the reader's interest is so strongly enlisted in the fortunes of two boys and a runaway negro that he follows their adventures with keen curiosity, although his common sense tells him that the incidents are as absurd and fantastic in many ways as the "Arabian Nights."
 
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Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter.
Quotations
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Please keep the Norton Annotated Series books un-combined with the rest of them - it is significantly different with new material, pictures etc.. and it needs to be separate.
The Norton Annotated Series book is not the -- or "a" -- "standard" edition. Rather, it is the complete book, as Twain intended it, taken from the original final MS, half of which was missing for over a century. It is, therefore, a DIFFERENT BOOK IN TEXTUAL CONTENT.
This is the only "comprehensive edition" of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Which means: long missing and believed lost for good was the first half (over 600 pages) of Twain's final manuscript of the book. Some years ago it was found, by chance, in a trunk in an attic in California, then reunited with the other half in Buffalo. Upon reading it was found to contain materials that had been excluded by the publisher -- therefore from first edition onward the book was actually not wholly as Twain intended. Those portions are included in this edition (and in a more scholarly Mark Twain Project/Library edition), which makes it a different work than the heretofore "standard" edition/s.
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Canonical titleAdventures of Huckleberry Finn
Original publication date1884 (Charles L. Webster And Company)
SeriesTom Sawyer (2)
People/CharactersHuckleberry Finn, Jim, Tom Sawyer, Pap Finn, Widow Douglas, Miss Watson (show all 9)
Important placesMississippi River, USA, St. Petersburg, Missouri, USA, Jackson's Island
Awards and honorsThe Observer's 100 Greatest Novels of All Time (2003), 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006/2008 Edition), Guardian 1000 (War and travel), ALA 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 (5), The Ten Greatest Books of All Time - TIME (2007), Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List (2009, No. 54) (show all 7)
First wordsYou don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter.
Last words(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
DescriptionOf all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This idyll, intended at first as "a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer", grew and matured under Ma... (show all)
Book description
Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This idyll, intended at first as "a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer", grew and matured under Mark Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. Critics have argued over the symbolic significance of Huck's and Jim's voyage down the Mississippi: none has disputed the greatness of the book itself. It remains a work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story, as a classic of American humour, and as a metaphor for the American predicament.

Amazon.com (ISBN 0140366768, Paperback)

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.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400)

(see all 6 descriptions)

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