The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (modern library)

Author(s): Mark Twain; George Saunders (Introduction by)

Classics

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by the American Mark Twain, published in London on December 4, 1884 under the title The Adventures of Finn Huckleberry, then in New York in February of the following year under the title Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.The beginning and the end of the book are misleading: taking up the light tone of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, featuring characters from this novel, they suggest that we are in the presence of a sequel and children's literature. But the body of the story is not harmless. It is a terrifying dive into the darkest of human nature, a violent challenge to social norms and religion.The narrator is a young boy who fled Civilization in the company of an escaped slave. He recounts their wandering about 1,800 kilometers on a raft descending the Mississippi. The child's ingenuous gaze on the flaws of civilized people feeds the virulent satire of a hypocritical society, which reverses the notions of good and evil.Less well known than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is a book for youth, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is often regarded as Twain's masterpiece, and as the founding book of modern American literature: it was by the profoundly innovative style of this novel that she would have begun to detach herself from English literature, to exist by herself.The action is in the 1840s, that is to say twenty years before the American Civil War, forty years before the publication of the book. Huck lives in Missouri, a state sometimes considered part of the South, in the imaginary city of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, a village where Mark Twain spent his childhood. Hannibal is located northeast of the state, some 150 kilometers upstream from St. Louis, on the Mississippi River, which separates Missouri from Illinois. Jackson Island, not far from St. Petersburg, is Glasscock Island, now extinct.AuthorMark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri (USA) and died April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut (USA), is an American writer, essayist and humorist. .After a career as a soldier, printer and journalist for miners in Nevada, he became known for his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). From 1864, he worked as a reporter in San Francisco and moved to Europe as a press correspondent. After marrying Olivia Langdon in 1870, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut. He had 4 children including 3 daughters: Susan, Clara and Jeanne and a son who died prematurely. In his early novels, Mark Twain evokes his travels in Europe and Polynesia (The Journey of the Innocents, 1869) by mocking the prejudices and conduct of his compatriots, as well as his period as a researcher of gold and journalist on the Comstock Lode, in Hard Times (Mark Twain) (1872). Sent by his journal to Polynesia in 1866, Mark Twain spends four months there, sympathizes with sailors and whalers18, rents a horse18, and notes the dramatic decline of the original population, the Kanaka Maoli18. He reports reports and a series of letters published by the Sacramento Union, then collected in a book in 1947, Letters from Hawaii. It is thanks to his two novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) that he gains fame as a comic writer. Mark Twain, however, writes in the second part of his work more serious texts pessimistically denouncing the excesses of civilization and immorality erected in morality. The end of her life is clouded by financial troubles, as well as the death of one of her daughters at age 24 caused by meningitis and the death of his wife. He loses a second girl, aged 29, drowned in her bathtub after an epileptic seizure.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780375757372
  • : Random House Publishing Group
  • : Modern Library
  • : 0.22226
  • : August 2001
  • : .6 Inches X 5.1 Inches X 8 Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Mark Twain; George Saunders (Introduction by)
  • : Mark Twain; George Saunders (Introduction by)
  • : 304
  • : 304
  • : 823.92
  • : 823.92
  • : English
  • : English
  • : Paperback
  • : Paperback