Mark Twain's great American masterpiece, in a gorgeous new clothbound
edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These
delectable and collectible Penguin editions are bound in high-quality
colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design Mark Twain's
tale of a boy's picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft
conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other
work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the
'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a
series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery
of the unscrupulous 'Duke' and 'Dauphin'. Beneath the exploits, however,
are more serious undercurrents - of slavery, adult control and, above
all, of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt
values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with
Jim. Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on 30th November 1835,
in Florida, Missouri. In 1853 he left home, earning a living as an
itinerant type-setter, and four years later became an apprentice pilot
on the Mississippi, a career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War.
For five years, as a prospector and a journalist, Clemens lived in
Nevada and California. In February 1863 he first used the pseudonym
'Mark Twain' as the signature to a humorous travel letter. A trip to
Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major
book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). His numerous subsequent books include
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Aborad (1880), The Prince
and the Pauper (1882), and his masterpiece, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Fin (1885). Twain died on 21st April 1910. 'The best book
we've had' - Ernest Hemingway
