Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / Life on the Mississippi / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Pudd'nhead Wilson [J0022]

1982 - HCDJ Excellent condition. 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.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "t's full of the usual tall tales and mordant stories of America's odd characters, along with numerous observations about places passed along the way, and of the river itself. By far the best part is that, early on, of how Twain became a riverboat pilot - alternately hilarious and harrowing - as well as the account of the steamboat's ultimate decline as a means of transit, shipping ... and magic. Ultimately uneven, but a worth the read and a fascinating glimpse into an author struggling to understand this great river and it's place as he attempted to complete his master work, "Huck Finn.""; "The three novels are all classic Twain and, while not as engaging as I would have hoped from their lofty reputations, they are all funny with great prose and good commentary on the era. I thouroughly enjoyed Twain's reminiscences in Life on the Mississippi, which was much more what I was hoping for in the novels."; "Not a big fan of the ubiquitous Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, but was really taken by Life on the Mississippi; highly recommended for that book alone. I must confess that I've also been a fan of Pudd'nhead Wilson for a long time-- hard to get through that one without a few spit-takes-- the sense of humor at work is first rate."