Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The text of the novel offered in this Norton Critical Edition has been collated with a facsimile text of the l885 first American edition. The annotations have been extensively reworked. The new edition reflects the wealth of Mark Twain scholarship that has been produced in the fifteen years since the publication of the first Norton Critical Edition. Perhaps as many as 200 essays have appeared in these years focusing upon Huckleberry Finn alone. plus much material on Twain. including new editions of his writings.

New selections in Backgrounds and Sources include five additional letters about the composition and publication of the novel. excerpts from the uproar that resulted when the Concord Public Library banned Huckleberry Finn from its shelves. and Twain's account of the Darnell-Watson feud in Life on the Mississippi.

In the Criticism section. Thomas Sergeant Perry's first American review joins Brander Matthews's early review. The provocative essays by Lionel Trilling and T. S. Eliot. along with Leo Marx’s “answer." have been retained and new essays by James M. Cox and Roy Harvey Pearce on the ending have been added. The Raftsmen's Passage is now given a separate section, which includes Peter G. Beidler‘s version of the argument that the passage should be restored to the text. Also newly included are essays by Ralph Ellison, Leslie Fiedler. Edwin H. Cady. Judith Fetterley. and Henry Nash Smith, whose chapter on the novel from his book Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer is reprinted in full.

--back cover