Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910). He was born and brought up in the American state of Missouri and, because of his father's death, he left school to earn his living when he was only twelve. He was a great adventurer and travelled round America as a printer; prospected for gold and set off for South America to earn his fortune. He returned to become a steam-boat pilot on the Mississippi River, close to where he had grown up. The Civil War put an end to steam-boating and Clemens briefly joined the Confederate army. He had already tried his hand at newspaper reporting and now became a successful journalist. He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. John Seelye is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at the University of Florida. Lilli Carre is the author of Tales of the Woodsman Pete and The Lagoon. She lives in Chicago.
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It's the best book we've had." --Ernest Hemingway
The Mark Twain Project used the second half of the original manuscript of Twain's masterwork (given by Twain to the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library), together with the first half from the first American edition of 1885, for its 1985 edition of the novel. In 1990, however, the first half of the original manuscript was found in the attic of the great-granddaughter of James Gluck, the curator of the Buffalo library. While the recovery of the first half of the manuscript (told in detail in "Note on the Text") is itself an interesting detective story, the upshot of the matter is that the present text represents the whole manuscript as Twain surely intended it before typesetters and proofreaders introduced the errors that we have been reading all these years. Most of those numerous errors are minor (misspellings and punctuation errors), but some are significant (three revised sections of the novel, for example). Few but Twain scholars will appreciate the meticulous editing that has gone into this volume, but those who care will be able to see more clearly than ever how carefully Twain revised the novel into its greatness. Highly recommended for all scholarly libraries. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It's the best book we've had." --Ernest Hemingway
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