NEW YORK – This summer, a new book continues the adventures of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
An edition of the classic novel has just been released by the Mark Twain Project at the University of California Press at Berkeley. Based on Twain’s long-lost original manuscript, the book contains numerous minor alterations and a ghost story told by the runaway slave Jim.
“We’re trying to get the book as close as possible to how Twain would have wanted it,” says the project’s general editor, Robert H. Hirst.
The Berkeley editors aren’t the first to say this, and probably won’t be the last. Like rival explorers in search of a promised land, publishers keep on issuing new editions of Twain’s novel.
The current Berkeley book is advertised as “The Only Authoritative Text,” but it must compete with a Random House version billed as “The Only Comprehensive Edition” and endorsed by Twain’s literary estate. An earlier Berkeley publication is also called “The Only Authoritative Text.”
“When we say authoritative, we mean as authoritative as you can be at the time,” Mr. Hirst explains. “In the previous edition, we only had half of the original manuscript. This time, we had the whole text.”
The 1996 Random House version and the current Berkeley edition use the same rediscovered material, but in different ways.
Random House, for example, places Jim’s ghost story in the actual narrative. Berkeley sets it aside in the appendix.
“If we thought he had been forced to remove it, we would have kept it in the body of the text,” Mr. Hirst says. “But from what we can tell, he decided the story didn’t work.”
Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Publication Date: June 2001
588 pages, 5-3/8 x 8-1/2 inches, 221 illustrations, 5 maps
Clothbound: $45.00 0-520-22806-5
Paperback: $14.95 0-520-22838-3
