Mark Twain's great American masterpiece in a gorgeous new clothbound edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith These delectable & 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 & experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before When Huck escapes from his drunken father & the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families & the trickery of the unscrupulous ' Duke' & ' Dauphin' Beneath the exploits however are more serious undercurrents
- of slavery adult control & above all of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness & the corrupt values of society which threaten his deep & 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 & 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 & a journalist Clemens lived in Nevada & California In February 1863 he first used the pseudonym ' Mark Twain' as the signature to a humorous travel letter A trip to Europe & 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 & the Pauper (1882) & his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1885) Twain died on 21st April 1910' The best book we've had'
- Ernest Hemingway