The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

(Hardback)

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Proclaimed by H.L. Mencken as one of the great masterpieces of the world and by Ernest Hemingway as the source of all modern American literature, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" remains firmly established in both the American and world literary canons as a classic work of literature. Yet it continues to have its critical detractors and still arouses the kind of impassioned controversy that banned it from the Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library on publication as "trashy and vicious". "The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn" contains newspaper articles, book reviews, and scholarly essays spanning the period from the early response in the 1880s, through the centennial celebration, to the present. The collection relects the major literary trends and issues of response to "Huckleberry Finn", such as the persistent attempts to ban the book, the literary criticism concerning the book's ending, and the many thematic interpretations. Among the essayists included are literary figures such as T.S. Elliot and Twain specialist scholars such as Walter Blair, Leo Marx, and James Cox. The text of an ABC-TV "Nightline" News Special on the centennial, "Huckleberry Finn: Literature or Racist Trash" is printed. Editor Champion provides an introductory overview on the range and issues of critical response, a feature on the various adaptations of "Huckleberry Finn", and a bibliography of additional scholarship. Of interest to any scholar or researcher of Mark Twain, the collection should be valuable to teachers and students reading "Huckleberry Finn" at any level from high school upward.

Reviews

Champion's The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1991) makes a worthy addition to these convenient research tools for students of Twain's novel.-Southern Quarterly
This excellent guide to perhaps the most popular novel in American literary history collects important essays and reviews from early responses of 1885 (the date of the book's first American publication) to recent times. Recommended for all reference collections on American literature.-Reference Book Review
"Champion's The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1991) makes a worthy addition to these convenient research tools for students of Twain's novel."-Southern Quarterly
"This excellent guide to perhaps the most popular novel in American literary history collects important essays and reviews from early responses of 1885 (the date of the book's first American publication) to recent times. Recommended for all reference collections on American literature."-Reference Book Review

Author Bio

LAURIE CHAMPION, a graduate student at the University of North Texas, is working on a collection of critical essays on Eudora Welty's fiction to appear in the same Greenwood Press series.