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Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Introduction by Miles Donald

Part of Everyman's Library Classics Series

Author Mark Twain
Introduction by Miles Donald
Hardcover
$30.00 US
Knopf | Everyman's Library
5.3"W x 8.3"H x 1.3"D   | 22 oz | 12 per carton
On sale Nov 26, 1991 | 600 Pages | 978-0-679-40584-9
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Along with Blake and Dickens, Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest chroniclers of childhood. These two novels reveal different aspects of his genius: Tom Sawyer is a much-loved story about the sheer pleasure of being a boy; Huckleberry Finn, the book Hemingway said was the source of all the American fiction that followed it, is both a hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a tremendous parable of innocence in conflict with the fallen adult world.

“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.” –Ernest Hemingway

“As characters Tom and Huck have become American myths (a form of transubstantiation achieved by remarkably few fictional creations in the last hundred years), and that very fact indicates that whatever distinctions are made between the two novels, and however many reservations are cited about either or both, Twain possessed extraordinary imaginative power.” –from the Introduction by Miles Donald
MARK TWAIN, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting that inspired his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at 12 when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, described by writer William Dean Howells as “the Lincoln of our literature.” Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had four children—a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean. View titles by Mark Twain

About

Along with Blake and Dickens, Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest chroniclers of childhood. These two novels reveal different aspects of his genius: Tom Sawyer is a much-loved story about the sheer pleasure of being a boy; Huckleberry Finn, the book Hemingway said was the source of all the American fiction that followed it, is both a hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a tremendous parable of innocence in conflict with the fallen adult world.

Praise

“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.” –Ernest Hemingway

“As characters Tom and Huck have become American myths (a form of transubstantiation achieved by remarkably few fictional creations in the last hundred years), and that very fact indicates that whatever distinctions are made between the two novels, and however many reservations are cited about either or both, Twain possessed extraordinary imaginative power.” –from the Introduction by Miles Donald

Author

MARK TWAIN, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting that inspired his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at 12 when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, described by writer William Dean Howells as “the Lincoln of our literature.” Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had four children—a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean. View titles by Mark Twain

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