The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bantam Classic)

Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with  the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark  Twain's story about a young boy and his journey  down the Mississippi was the first great novel to  speak in a truly American voice. Influencing  subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood  Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian,  T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William  Faulkner to J.D. Salinger --  Huckleberry Finn, like the river  which flows through its pages, is one of the great  sources which nourished and still nourishes the  literature of America.

A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published.