The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. This edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 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, and is indispensable to a full understanding of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The changes, deletions, and additions that Mark Twain made in the original manuscript indicate that he frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational work than the book he finally published. He deleted an episode in which whites at a religious camp meeting try to avoid the embraces of a black slave woman—a woman who may think, mistakenly, that she has just been freed. And even in its smallest variations—such as the consistent alteration of vicious rawhide whip- pings to ordinary cowhide whippings—the original manuscript demonstrates the skill, the restraint, and the constraints that affected Mark Twain's creative process.

In gathering and presenting valuable new literary evidence, together with a Foreword by Victor Doyno, an Introduction by Justin Kaplan, and the original illustrations, this com- prehensive edition lends strong support to the growing critical consensus that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is indeed the great American novel. It is sure to become the standard text not only for schools and universities but for the general reader as well.