A major editorial choice had to be determined for the text. Scholars have vigorously debated whether a lengthy passage extracted from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn and published in Chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi (1883) to illustrate the rawness of early river days should be reinserted into the novel from which it was then omitted. In this adventure Huck swims to a large raft and listens while “a mighty rough looking lot” of raftsmen drink, argue, sing, dance, and swap yarns. The men discover Huck in his hiding place, threaten to “paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel,” but let him go with a stern warning. Mark Twain agreed to delete the episode from Huckleberry Finn for fear that the public might think he was duplicating “old matter” (Twain’s words) in his new book (since he had used it previously in Life on the Mississippi) and because the publisher pointed out that Huckleberry Finn was longer than Tom Sawyer, damaging the impression that they were companion volumes.
The author went along with his publisher’s suggestion on April 22, 1884 so obligingly (“Yes, I think the raft chapter can be left wholly out”) that most subsequent editions of the novel have followed suit. This present Original Text Edition incorporates the raftsmen passage into Chapter 16 as Twain initially wrote it in his manuscript and published it in the American edition of Life on the Mississippi. That episode, with its strutting, pugnacious braggarts and its chilling ghost tale about a child’s murder, contains some of Mark Twain’s best writing. Its inclusion enables readers to savor more of Twain contributions to the then-reigning “Local Color” school of regional fiction that prized vivid descriptions of an area’s vocations and peculiarities.
Textual Emendations
With the exception of the insertion of the raftsmen passage, the text of this novel otherwise follows the wording of the first American edition. Issues about questionable punctuation were resolved by consulting a facsimile of Twain’s manuscript. The editor has silently modernized certain eccentricities of nineteenth-century punctuation and spelling, and has given American spellings preference over British spellings. Obvious typographical errors introduced by the printers and inconsistent spellings have been corrected.
Dr. Alan Gribben co-founded the Mark Twain Circle of America, compiled Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, and recently co-edited Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader. Gribben has written numerous essays about Mark Twain’s life and image. He teaches on the English faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery and edits the Mark Twain Journal.
Selected Relevant Print and Digital Works
Arac, Jonathan. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
____________. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Beidler, Peter G. “The Raft Episode in Huckleberry Finn,” Modern Fiction Studies 14 (Spring 1968): 11–20.
Black, Ronald J. “The Psychological Necessity of the Evasion Sequence in Huckleberry Finn,” CEA Critic 52 (Summer 1990): 35–44.
Blair, Walter. Mark Twain & Huck Finn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
Budd, Louis J. “The Recomposition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Missouri Review 10, no. 1 (1987): 113–129.
___________. “The Southward Currents Under Huck Finn’s Raft,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1949): 222–237.
Carey-Webb, Allen. “Racism and Huckleberry Finn: Censorship, Dialogue, and Change,” English Journal 82 (November 1993): 22–34.
Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. “Ebonics, Jim, and New Approaches to Understanding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom. Ed. James S. Leonard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. 164–181.
____________. “Huck Finn: Icon or Idol—Yet a Necessary Read,” Mark Twain Annual 3 (2005): 37–40.
___________. The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Companion to Mark Twain. Eds. Peter Messsent and Louis J. Budd. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Csicsila, Joseph. Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Dempsey, Terrell. Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Doyno, Victor A. Beginning to Write Huck Finn: Essays in Genetic Criticism, in Huck Finn: The Complete Buffalo & Erie County Public Library Manuscript Teaching and Research Digital Edition. CD-ROM. Ed. Victor A. Doyno et al. Buffalo, NY: Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, 2003.
______________. Writing “Huck Finn”: Mark Twain’s Creative Process. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Fetterley, Judith. “Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn,” PMLA 87 (January 1972): 69–74.
Fischer, Victor. “Huck Finn Reviewed: The Reception of Huckleberry Finn in the United States, 1885–1897,” American Literary Realism 16 (Spring 1983): 1–57.
Fulton, Joe B. Mark Twain’s Ethical Realism: The Aesthetics of Race, Class, and Gender. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
___________. The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Gardner, Richard M. “Huck Finn’s Ending: The Intimacy and Disappointment of Tourism,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (Winter 1994): 55–68.
Gribben, Alan. “Boy Books, Bad Boy Books, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Ed. Beverly Lyon Clark. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007: 290–306.
___________. “Foreword,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: The Big Read, Alabama Edition. Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2009: 9–17.
___________. “‘I Did Wish Tom Sawyer Was There’: Boy-Book Elements in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,” in One Hundred Years of “Huckleberry Finn”: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985: 149–170.
___________. “‘If I’d a Knowed What a Trouble It Was to Quote a Book’: Literary References in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn,” in Huck Finn: The Complete Buffalo & Erie County Public Library Manuscript Teaching and Research Digital Edition. CD-ROM. Ed. Victor A. Doyno et al. Buffalo, NY: Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, 2003: 1–9.
___________. “Manipulating a Genre: Huckleberry Finn as Boy Book,” South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association 5 (Winter 1988): 15–21.
Hansen, Chadwick. “The Character of Jim and the Ending of Huckleberry Finn,” Massachusetts Review 5 (Autumn 1963): 45–66.
Hill, Richard. “Overreaching: Critical Agenda and the Ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in Mark Twain Among the Scholars: Reconsidering Contemporary Twain Criticism. Ed. Richard Hill and Jim McWilliams. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Co., 2002: 67–90.
Howard, Douglas L. “Silencing Huck Finn,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 August 2004, C1, C4.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Hill and Wang, cop. 1940; repr. 1993.
Kiskis, Michael J. “Critical Humbug: Samuel Clemens’ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain Annual 3 (2005): 13–22.
Leonard, James S. “Racial Objections to Huckleberry