Wandering Huck Finn finally turns up in a Hollywood attic

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has inspired dispute throughout its history. Recent controversy has tended to concentrate on Twain's representation of race in the text. But it has focused too on what Jonathan Arac called, in 1997, the "hypercanonisation" of the novel - the way it has come to be valued as "the highest image of America", forced "to carry national-political burdens it wasn't made for". Despite this, Toni Morrison's earlier verdict on this "amazing, troubling book" should still stand. Praising the novel for a "language cut for its renegade tongue and sharp intelligence", she calls it a work of "classic literature which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts".

The Mark Twain Project at the University of California has long been associated with the most accurate and fully documented editions of Twain's writings. This is a revision of its earlier 1985 volume, producing "the only authoritative text" of the novel. An intriguing story lies behind this (justifiable) claim. The second half of Twain's original handwritten manuscript of Huckleberry Finn is held in the Buffalo and Erie County Library. In 1990, the long missing, and presumed lost, first half was found in a Hollywood attic, and is now restored alongside. A full account of this discovery, and the legal wrangles that followed, is given here in the "note on the text". The upshot, however, is that for the first time, it has been possible to date the full composition of the novel accurately. It has also meant that the text can now be published "as Mark Twain wanted it, using the evidence of the whole manuscript to correct errors, mend oversights, and otherwise restore hundreds of details that were lost during the original process of typing, typesetting, and proofreading his book".

This is an impressive and meticulously edited volume, which will certainly become the standard version of the text. Besides the novel itself and its illustrations, the book contains appendices illustrating the work Twain did as he moved toward the final published version of the text. So, at the start of chapter 19, the manuscript version "not a sound, anywheres - perfectly still - just as if the whole world was dead asleep", becomes the final "not a sound, anywheres - perfectly still - just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe". The "ghost story" told by Jim that Twain eventually decided to cut from the novel is also reprinted here. There are revised versions (from the 1985 edition) of maps of the Mississippi valley, glossary of dialect and slang terms and substantial explanatory notes on the text. These last are particularly illuminating in giving something of the thick cultural context out of which Twain's novel came: his references to the popular songs, medical authorities, art works, poetry, magazines, literary texts, music and so on, of his, and Huck's, day. Thus the note on "The Battle of Prague" (described by Huck at the Grangerfords as "ever so lovely") illustrates the comedy Twain releases at his protagonist's naive expense: "A ten-minute piano piece of program music written in 1788 by Franz Kotzwara... of Bohemia. It featured staccato notes to simulate flying bullets and a wailing treble figure to suggest the cries of the wounded. By the 1840s it had become an over-worked standard." This "popular edition" will be followed by a much more detailed version in the Works of Mark Twain scholarly edition, aimed mainly at libraries and Twain specialists. As one of the latter, I am excited by the prospect. Most readers, both general and academic, will be happy enough though with the present splendid (and cheap) volume.

Peter Messent is professor of modern American literature, University of Nottingham.