A novel inspired by Mark Twain's classic tales explores the mysterious life and strange death of Huckleberry Finn's infamous father, describing Finn's fearsome father, the Judge; his brother, the sickly, sycophantic Will; and young Huck.

Presents a collection of critical essays on the novel that analyze its structure, characters, themes, and portrayal of race issues.

An overview of the novel features a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical essays about the work.

Product Description: This controversial book will enter the debate over the proper place of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in―or, better, out―of the classroom. For years, middle and high school students across the U.S. have been required to read Twain's work because the dominant white community has revered it as an antiracist classic...read more

Product Description: This controversial book will enter the debate over the proper place of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in—or, better, out—of the classroom. For years, middle and high school students across the U.S. have been required to read Twain's work because the dominant white community has revered it as an antiracist classic...read more

Much about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is ageless, yet its author was completely immersed in the age in which he wrote. Refiguring "Huckleberry Finn" looks at ways contemporary American culture and history influenced the formation of Mark Twain's masterwork. It also shows how the novel reflects Twain's deep investment in what Carl F. Wieck calls "an openminded, unbiased perception of the well-springs of the American spirit".Clearly, Twain knew the Mississippi River and its people well. With Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, Ulysses S. Grant, and John Hay (Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary) among his friends, Twain also knew America. That understanding, Wieck shows us, is richly evident in Huckleberry Finn by the ways Twain explored themes of justice, rights, knowledge, and truth; engaged with the thought of Douglass, Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson; and expressed concern over the public discourse on race and equality.In addition, in discussions that range from number play in the novel to the symbolic potential of the Mississippi's awesome, one-way flow, Wieck looks closely at Twain's storytelling craft. Filled with new and challenging insights, Refiguring "Huckleberry Finn" reintroduces us to one of our greatest novels and one of our finest novelists.

A critical examination of Mark Twain's character of Huckleberry Finn.

Traces the process and influences behind the writing of Mark Twain's novel, Huckleberry Finn, which was published in the late nineteenth century and has been banned frequently since then for his use of racial epithets or simply for being coarse.

Product Description: Huck, Jim and Tom are American immortals. They resonate in the popular culture and, at the same time, provoke the continual concern and interest of intellectuals in the academic community. When the book was first published, and for years thereafter, many

Product Description: Huckleberry Finn and Mark Twain was conceived as aid to students and general readers although it can be of value to scholars. The author, when on the library staff at Miami University ( Oxford, Ohio), saw the need for a book touching all sides of the famed novelist and his chief novel...read more

Offers critical commentaries, character analyses, essays, and review questions on 'Huckleberry Finn.'

Product Description: For the first time in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling a wide-ranging collection of extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, these smart and sophisticated study guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on one or more texts by a given writer...read more

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Offers a brief profile of Mark Twain, and examines the plot, characters, and themes in 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

Offers a brief profile of Mark Twain, and examines the plot, characters, and themes in 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

In "Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn", Tom Quirk traces the history of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from its inception in 1876 to its problematic presence in today's American culture. By approaching Twain's novel from several quite different perspectives, Quirk reveals how the author's imagination worked and why this novel has affected so many people for so long and in so many curious ways. The variety of approaches to the novel in these essays demonstrates that there are many ways to come to grips with "Huckleberry Finn". In the introduction, Quirk offers a summary of the significant changes in our understanding of the novel that have resulted from the discovery of over 600 manuscript pages in California. He then inquires into the genesis of the book and measures the author's imaginative involvement with his hero by studying the novel in the context of Twain's autobiographical writings. Quirk also explores Twain's ambivalent relationship to another of the novel's characters, the escaped slave, Jim. He examines the special association Huckleberry Finn bears to 19th-century realism and contemplates the double legacy the book has bequeathed to later American writers, including Willa Cather, Ring Lardner and Langston Hughes. Finally, he asks, "Is 'Huckleberry Finn' politically correct?" and measures the book against current ideological opinion. The book offers a lucid history of the imagination of Mark Twain as it is disclosed in "Huckleberry Finn", a book that has had diverse effects on readers and writers for over 100 years. "Coming to Grips with 'Hucklebery Finn'" should be valuable to students and scholars of American literature.

Product Description: MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work...read more

Ernest Hemingway asserted, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Lionel Trilling said the novel was "not less than definitive in American literature." Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American voices played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how African-American voices have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.

Product Description: Though one of America’s best known and loved novels, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been the object of fierce controversy because of its racist language and reliance on racial stereotypes. This collection of fifteen essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examines the novel’s racist elements and assesses the degree to which Twain’s ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism...read more

Essays examine the racist elements of Huckleberry Finn and the extent to which they are able to turn the novel into a satirical attack on racism

Product Description: Proclaimed by H.L. Mencken as one of the great masterpieces of the world and by Ernest Hemingway as the source of all modern American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains firmly established in both the American and world literary canons as a classic work of literature...read more

Literary criticism of Twain's greatest work