The 1885 Reviews of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn must be pronounced the most amusing book Mark Twain has written for years. It is a more minute and faithful picture of Southwestern manners and customs fifty years ago than was Life on the Mississippi, while in regard to the dialect it surpasses any of the author’s previous stories in the command of the half-dozen species of patois which passed for the English language in old Missouri. Mark Twain may be called the Edison of our literature. There is no limit to his inventive genius, and the best proof of its range and originality is found in this book, in which the reader’s interest is so strongly enlisted in the fortunes of two boys and a runaway negro that he follows their adventures with keen curiosity, although his common sense tells him that the incidents are as absurd and fantastic in many ways as the Arabian Nights. Here is where the genius and the human nature of the author come in. Nothing else can explain such a tour de force as this, in which the most unlikely materials are transmuted into a work of literary art. ..." [mehr] http://lithub.com/the-1885-reviews-of-mark-twains-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/