The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Description

Rather than be 'sivilized' by the Widow Douglas, Huckleberry Finn - the grubby but good-natured son of a local drunk - sets off with Jim, an escaped slave, to find freedom on the Mississippi river. With the law on their tail, they navigate a world of robbers, slave hunters and con men, and Huck must choose between what society says is 'right' and his own burgeoning understanding of Jim's friendship and humanity. Nostalgic and melancholy in equal measure, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a razor-sharp satire of the antebellum South that, despite beginning life as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is now seen in its own right as one of the most important of all American novels. This beautiful Macmillan Collector's Library edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn features an afterword by playwright and screenwriter Peter Harness. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835. Early in his childhood, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri - a town which would provide the inspiration for St Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When he started writing in earnest in his thirties, he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain (the cry of a Mississippi boatman taking depth measurements, meaning 'two fathoms'), and a string of highly successful publications followed. His later life, however, was marked by personal tragedy and sadness, as well as financial difficulty. In 1894, several businesses in which he had invested failed, and he was declared bankrupt. Over the next fifteen years he saw the deaths of two of his beloved daughters, and his wife. Increasingly bitter and depressed, Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-four.