"Seelye's version seems even funnier than the original, and also more moving, since Seelye's Huck Finn is even less sentimental about life and Tom Sawyer than Twain's Huck Finn. He is also more perceptive about black people than the original." -- Hughes Rudd, CBS News "Seelye has stitched together a whale of a book. Without reference to Twain's own version, it is almost impossible to see the seams where 1970 joins 1884." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek
In Its Distrust Of Too Much Civilisation And Its Concern With The Way Language Turns Dreamy And Corrupt When Divorced From The Real Condition Of Life, Huckleberry Finn Echoed Some Of The Central Concerns Of Life Today. Like All Great Works Of Fiction Where No Story Is Told As If It Is The Only One, Huck Finn Is Open-Ended, The 'Unfinished Story' Where The True Meaning Is Left To The Conscience And Imagination Of Each Reader.
"All modern American literature comes from one book called Huckleberry Finn," declared Ernest Hemingway. "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Yet even from the time of its first publication in 1885, Mark Twain's masterpiece has been one of the most celebrated and controversial books ever published in America. No other story so central to our American identity has been so loved and so reviled as Huck Finn's autobiography.