Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / Life on the Mississippi / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Pudd'nhead WilsonLibrary of America, 1982 M11 1 - 1126 pages This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. 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. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. |
From inside the book
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Contents
A Days Amusements Tom Reveals a Secret | 9 |
Tom Tells the Truth | 117 |
Toms Confidence Betrayed Expects Signal Punishment | 139 |
The Haunted House | 148 |
The Picnic Huck on Injun Joes Track | 171 |
An Exploring Expedition | 178 |
Tom tells the Story of their Escape Toms Enemy in | 195 |
A New Order of Things Poor Huck New | 210 |
622 | |
SundaySchools and Brick | 639 |
An Independent Race Twentyfourhour Towns | 659 |
521 | 666 |
APPENDIX | 693 |
War Talk | 694 |
Tourists and their Notebooks Captain Hall | 940 |
Chronology | 1057 |
The Mississippi is Well worth Reading about It | 227 |
Besieging the Pilot Taken along Spoiling a Nap | 254 |
River Inspectors | 269 |
Loaded to Win | 330 |
Old French Settlements We start for Memphis | 369 |
Murels Gang A Consummate Villain Getting | 396 |
Mr Dickens has a Word Best Dwellings | 452 |
The Solemn Oath Terror Brings Repentance Mental | 544 |
Family A Goldenhaired Darling The Mysterious | 554 |
Tom Shows his Generosity Aunt Polly Weakens | 571 |
22 | 1066 |
28 | 1079 |
Note on the Texts | 1107 |
37 | 1112 |
Notes | 1113 |
586 | 1120 |
42 | 1124 |
53 | |
Other editions - View all
Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ... Mark Twain No preview available - 1982 |
Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ... Mark Twain No preview available - 1982 |
Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ... Mark Twain No preview available - 1982 |
Common terms and phrases
ain't Aunt Polly Aunt Sally bank Becky began better Bixby boat boys by-and-by Cairo canoe captain carpet-bags Carson City dark dead dollars door duke eyes face fetch fool friends girl give gone gwyne half hand head hear heard heart hour Huck hundred Injun Joe island Joe Harper judged kill kind king laugh look Louis Mark Twain mighty miles mind minute Mississippi Mississippi River morning never nigger night once Orleans pilot pilot-house pow-wow pretty soon raft reckon river Roxy Sawyer says shore side skiff sleep steamboat stood stopped talk tears tell there's thing thought told Tom Sawyer Tom's took tow-head town trouble turned Uncle Uncle Silas Vicksburg village wait warn't watch widow wigwam woods yawl young