Mark Twain : Mississippi Writings : Tom Sawyer, Life on the

Mark Twain : Mississippi Writings : Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson (Library of America)

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 SawyerÂ â€œis simply a hymn,â€ said its author, â€œput into prose form to give it a worldly air,â€ a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain beganÂ Huckleberry FinnÂ the same yearÂ Tom SawyerÂ 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 toÂ Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twainâ€™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.
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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 mythologyâ€”not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave inÂ Puddnâ€™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 withÂ Puddnâ€™head Wilson,Â high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence.
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Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the â€œstrong brown god.â€ For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nationâ€™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 pilotâ€”an experience recounted inÂ Life on the Mississippiâ€”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 AMERICAÂ is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nationâ€™s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americaâ€™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.
Country USA
Brand Library of America
Manufacturer Library of America
Binding Hardcover
Color Black
ReleaseDate 1982-11-01
UnitCount 1
Format Box set
EANs 9780940450073

Country	USA
Brand	Library of America
Manufacturer	Library of America
Binding	Hardcover
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	1982-11-01
UnitCount	1
Format	Box set
EANs	9780940450073

Mark Twain : Mississippi Writings : Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson (Library of America)

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