The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

TWAIN, Mark (ed. & intro. Bernard DeVoto; illus. Thomas Hart Benton). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1994.

Octavo. Full burgundy leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. [viii], lxxvi, [iv], 396 pp. Frontispiece portrait of Twain in watercolour by Hodges Soileau. 87 illustrations by Thomas Hart Benton throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series.

Ernest Hemingway wrote that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It is a claim made without qualification, and it has not been seriously disputed in the ninety years since he made it. Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, a sequel of sorts to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but a wholly different kind of book: a darker, more politically serious, and narrated in a vernacular voice that had no real precedent in American fiction. Huck Finn runs away from his violent, drunken father and falls in with Jim, an enslaved man who has escaped from his owner and is making his way north to freedom. Together they travel down the Mississippi on a raft, and the moral education that Huck undergoes in the course of that journey is the central drama of the novel. It is also one of the most honestly rendered moral arguments in American literature: Huck does not arrive at his conclusion through abstract principle but through experience and feeling, in defiance of everything he has been taught.

The novel was immediately controversial and has remained so, for reasons that have shifted with each generation of readers. It was first challenged for its coarseness; it has more recently been challenged for its use of racial language. The argument about what the novel means, and what it is for, and whether it should be taught in schools, continues — which is another way of saying that it continues to matter.

The Easton Press Collector's Edition presents the text edited and introduced by Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955), the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and critic whose 1941 introduction remains one of the most searching assessments of Twain's achievement. The 87 illustrations by Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) are among the most sympathetic visual accompaniments the novel has received.

Fine. Presents as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000472