ADVENTURES
of
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
(Tom Sawyer’s Comrade).
Scene: The Mississippi Valley
Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago
by
Mark Twain
With One Hundred and Seventy-Four Illustrations
New York:
Charles L. Webster and Company
1885
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
By Order of the Author
Per G. G., Chief Ordnance |
Huckleberry Finn.
EXPLANATORY
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
Mark Twain
From the Bust by Karl Gerhardt.
