Word: finne
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Mark Twain's dazzling Missouri humor always had hints of despair. Dark brooding crept into such cheerful works as The Innocents Abroad and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it filled later works like The Mysterious Stranger, virtually blotting out all gaiety. The last writing Twain did, in 1909, was such a lugubrious assault on man and God that Twain's surviving daughter, Clara Samossoud, refused to let it be published. In this, she followed the half-jesting advice of Twain himself. "Tomorrow," he wrote William Dean Howells, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs...
...Adams, for example, is accurate. Some aren't so hot, though. The section on Quincy House is frightening--full of talk about how "student-tutor" and "student-student relations" are on the up and up--while the description of Leverett is absurd, a wretched little parody of Huck Finn. There are far too many shots of people playing pool...
Author Leslie Fiedler, previously famed as the critic who detected homosexual themes in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, has now carried his war against fiction behind the enemy's lines. Effectively disguised as a short-story writer, Fiedler turns out, in Pull Down Vanity, a collection of tales of the kind favored lately by modish literary quarterlies and intellectualoid slicks. They constitute the sort of kitsch fiction-as stylized as the whodunit or science fiction-in which every thought, character and experience is as nauseating as possible...
...best; his other defects include a withered leg and a weak heart. Eventually both ailing parts give way, and Marvin pitches on his face amid the croquet balls as everyone laughs and laughs. The reader is left with a fascinating conjecture: What tendencies might the author of Huckleberry Finn have discovered in the writing of Leslie Fiedler...
...composition. For it was in the summer of 1876 that Mark Twain's rage against the restrictions of polite English reached its historic climax: he began work on a novel written entirely in the vernacular of an ignorant river waif. Fed up with literary lies, he wanted Huck Finn to speak not like boys in other books, but exactly the way a boy brought up in the tanyards of Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1840's would have spoken. Yet at the very heart of his determination to be true to Huck lay an awareness that censorship was inevitable. As Twain...