Mark Twain, Mississippi Writings -- Mark Twain

<b>This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including <i>Adventures of Hucklebery Finn</i>, together in one volume for the first time.</b> <p/> <i>Tom Sawyer</i> "is simply a hymn," said its author, "put into prose form to give it a worldly air," a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> the same year <i>Tom Sawyer</i> was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to <i>Life on the Mississippi</i>. The river in Twain's descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. <p/> Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology--not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in <i>Puddn'head Wilson</i>, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with <i>Puddn'head Wilson</i>, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. <p/> Through e