Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Publication Date: February 15, 2011
  • ISBN: 9781554810048 / 1554810043
  • 448 pages; 5½" x 8½"

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  • Publication Date: February 15, 2011
  • ISBN: 9781554810048 / 1554810043
  • 448 pages; 5½" x 8½"

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From its first appearance onward, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been both praised and condemned, enshrined as one of the world’s great novels and banned from libraries and classrooms. This new edition is designed to enable modern readers to explore the sources of its greatness, and also to take a fresh, open-minded look at the source of the current controversy about its place in the canon: its representation of race and slavery.

Based on the first American edition of 1885, this Broadview Edition includes all 174 original illustrations by E.W. Kemble. Appendices include contemporary reviews, passages deleted from the original manuscript, advertisements for the book, and a range of materials, from newspaper articles to minstrel show scripts to contemporary fiction, showing how race and slavery were depicted in the larger culture at the time.

Comments

“Broadview’s new Adventures of Huckleberry Finn answers the need for an edition of America’s most popular canonical novel that provides readers—and most especially student readers at all levels—with the critical tools essential to serious inquiry. The text is reliable and beautifully produced; Stephen Railton’s introduction is copious, well informed, and critically suggestive; and the several appendices, featuring a wide selection of contextual materials, nicely anticipate readers’ needs.” — Forrest Robinson, University of California, Santa Cruz

“This welcome new edition brings beautifully to life Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Mark Twain conceived it. Along with the excellent critical introduction and notes, the abundant contextual materials offer a superb recreation of the historical and cultural context in which the novel was written and read.” — Eric J. Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Appendix A: Related Mark Twain Texts

  1. “A True Story Reprinted Word for Word as I Heard It,” The Atlantic Monthly (November 1874)
  2. From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
  3. From Life on the Mississippi (1883)
  4. “Jim’s Ghost Story,” excluded manuscript passage from Huckleberry Finn (1876)
  5. Sequel to Huckleberry Finn, from Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
  6. Introducing Huckleberry Finn (1895)
  7. From “Chapters from My Autobiography, XIII,” North American Review (March 1907)

Appendix B: Contemporary Representations of Slavery and Race

  1. From “The Negro Out of Politics,” Chicago Tribune (24 April 1877)
  2. Blackface Minstrelsy (1880, 1884)
  3. “Tom Shows” (1882)
  4. From Thomas Nelson Page, “Mars Chan,” Century Magazine (April 1884)
  5. From George Washington Cable, “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” Century Magazine (January 1885)

Appendix C: Illustrating Huckleberry Finn

  1. E.W. Kemble, Illustration for The Thompson Street Poker Club (1884)
  2. From E.W. Kemble, “Illustrating Huckleberry Finn,” The Colophon (February 1930)
  3. E.W. Kemble, Illustration of African Slavery, Century Magazine (February 1890)
  4. E.W. Kemble, New Illustrations for Huckleberry Finn (1899)

Appendix D: Selling Huckleberry Finn

  1. Sales Prospectus Blurb for Huckleberry Finn (1884)
  2. Sales Prospectus Poster for Huckleberry Finn (1884)
  3. Promotional Flyer for Huck Finn (1885)
  4. “Twins of Genius” Lecture Program Minneapolis-St. Paul (24 January 1885)
  5. Advertisement from Webster & Co. Catalogue Advertising Editions of Huck Finn (1892)

Appendix E: Reception of Huckleberry Finn

  1. Reviews
    1. Athenaeum (27 December 1884)
    2. Brander Matthews, Saturday Review (31 January 1885)
    3. Hartford Courant (20 February 1885)
    4. Life (26 February 1885)
    5. Boston Evening Traveler (5 March 1885)
    6. Daily Evening Bulletin (14 March 1885)
    7. San Francisco Chronicle (15 March 1885)
    8. T.S. Perry, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (May 1885)
    9. The Atlanta Constitution (26 May 1885)
  2. Coverage of Concord Library’s Banning of Huckleberry Finn
    1. New York Herald (18 March 1885)
    2. Literary World (21 March 1885)
    3. San Francisco Chronicle (29 March 1885)
    4. The Critic (30 May 1885)
    5. Hartford Courant, with Mark Twain’s response (4 April 1885)
  3. Reviews of Twain’s Performance of the Novel Onstage
    1. The Washington Post (25 November 1884)
    2. The Globe (9 December 1884)
    3. The Pittsburgh Dispatch (30 December 1884)
    4. The Cincinnati Enquirer (4 January 1885)
    5. The Minneapolis Daily Tribune (25 January 1885)
    6. Wisconsin State Journal (28 January 1885)
    7. Chicago Daily Tribune (3 February 1885)

Appendix F: Freedom versus Fate

  1. From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
  2. From Life on the Mississippi (1883)
  3. From A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
  4. From “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901)
  5. From Twain’s Seventieth Birthday Dinner Speech
    (1905)
  6. From “The Turning Point of My Life,” Harper’s Bazaar
    (February 1911)

Select Bibliography

Stephen Railton is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He has published widely on nineteenth-century literature, particularly James Fenimore Cooper, the American Renaissance, and Mark Twain, and is the creator of major websites on Twain, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and William Faulkner.