Word: finn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TRUE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by John See/ye. 339 pages. Northwestern University...
John Seelye has pulled off one of the best literary stunts in a long while. He has substantially altered The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a puckish attempt to satisfy those critics who have found Mark Twain's masterpiece either artless, craftless, sexless, a gutless accommodation with commercialism or an overstuffed moral copout...
...doing so, Seelye, a 39-year-old associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has not only produced a lively, ribald narrative. He has also created a unique work of what can best be described as picaresque criticism. As Seelye's Huck Finn says in the introduction to his "true" adventures, "I want you to understand that this is a different book from the one Mr. Mark Twain wrote. It may look like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at first sight, but that don't mean a thing. Most of the parts was good ones...
Mark Twain anticipated the "crickit" problem when he first published Huckleberry Finn in 1884. In a prefatory notice he warned that persons attempting to find either motive, moral or plot in the novel would be respectively prosecuted, banished or shot. It was like a carrot farmer putting up a no-trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott...
...events that occurred before the play's action begins. Nothing new is happening, and in a musical this is unbearable. Not only that, but when we finally do learn the three-year-old scandal of Man Stamon and Mayor Quinn, it is confusingly presented; catalyst characters like Josie Finn are sufficiently undefined to screw...