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Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our national writers. This Library of America collection presents his best-known works, together for the first time in one volume.
Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports.
Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence.
Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery.
-- https://www.loa.org/books/79-mississippi-writings
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Literary collections, fiction in English, American writers, Literature, Anthologies, fiction, Short stories, American fiction, Humor, Biography, child witnesses, young men, Male friendship, Readers, Runaway children, voyages and travels, juvenile literature, rafting, adventure and adventurers, orphans, slavery, friendship, history, runaway teenagers, boys in literature, Slaves, Race relations, Boys, Fugitive slaves, Travel, English language, Juvenile fiction, Social life and customs, open_syllabus_project, American manuscripts, Long Now Manual for Civilization, relations Rafting (Sports), English fiction (collections), American literature, history and criticism, American fiction (fictional works by one author)People
Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Jim, Judge Thatcher, The Widow Douglas, FinnPlaces
Mississippi River, Missouri, Southern StatesTimes
1861-1900, 19th century, 1835-1845Showing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
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1
The Mississippi writings of Mark Twain: The adventures of Tom Sawyer ; Life on the Mississippi ; The adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2001, State Street Press
Unknown Binding
in English
0681979909 9780681979901
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2
The Mississippi Writings of Mark Twain
1996, Tally Hall Press
Hardcover
in English
0681219076 9780681219076
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3
Mississippi Writings: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson (The Library of America)
May 31, 1984, Cambridge University Press
Hardcover
in English
0521262208 9780521262200
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4
Mississippi Writings: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / Life on the Mississippi / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Pudd’nhead Wilson
1982, Library of America, Distributed to the trade by the Viking Press, Literary Classics of the United States
Hardcover
in English
0940450070 9780940450073
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Book Details
Table of Contents
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Reprint of works originally published 1876-1903.
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Work Description
Contains:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Life on the Mississippi
Pudd'nhead Wilson
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- Created April 1, 2008
- 23 revisions
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March 8, 2023 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
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