Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — The Companion Edition

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — The Companion Edition. Mark Twain's complete novel in the United States first-edition text (Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885; first published by Chatto & Windus, London, December 1884), printed unaltered — all 43 chapters, with the author's own Notice and Explanatory.

What makes this the Companion Edition: all 174 of E. W. Kemble's first-edition illustrations — the count both first-edition title pages advertise — restored to their original places in the text, plus the heliotype frontispiece portrait of Twain from Karl Gerhardt's bust. Companion apparatus: an introduction (seven years in the making; banned in Concord in 1885 as "trash"; the book's standing since, in Hemingway's judgment and others'), a Who's Who, five explainers (the river and the raft; the dialects Twain built "painstakingly"; the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud; the King and the Duke and the confidence-men tradition; and the famous ending controversy, given a fair hearing on both sides), a short life of Mark Twain, a plain and honest note on the book's period language, a four-meeting reading schedule, and discussion questions fenced by section so nothing is spoiled early.

Please read the language note before you begin: the novel uses the era's racial language, including slurs, and this edition prints the text exactly as written — Twain's target is slavery and the society built on it.

43 chapters · about 110,000 words · Companion Classics. Edited by Horace Harriott Jr.