"Truly an American odyssey. . . . It need not be stressed that Mark Twain re-created a full sense of life on the Mississippi. This is undisputed. He wrote with ease and buoyancy; there is humor, sensibility and beauty in his style. But there is real penetration, too. He evokes an entire epoch, which takes on organic shape, form, solidarity, depth." - The New York Times
"Huckleberry Finn is now read as a key to the very essence of the American imagination, a central document of our most primitive impulses." . . . Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer, quintessential because was more or less untutored-'a natural,' as Wright Morris puts it, 'who learned to write the way a river pilot learns the feel of a channel.'" - Norman
Podhoretz, New York Times, 1959 - Norman Podhoretz (New York Times 1959)
"The best book we've had ... There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." - Ernest Hemingway
"There was in Twain a healthy sense of democratic feelings, a hatred of oppression and injustice, a deep-seated feeling that men were more important than the rags and cloth of the past, the trumpery, the show, the color, the glitter attached to outmoded historic institutions. . . . [Twain] is the literary summation of pioneer America. And in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he distilled and transmuted his material in terms of great writing. . . . Truly an American odyssey. . . . Twain re-created a full sense of life on the Mississippi. . . . He wrote with ease and buoyancy; there is humor, sensibility and beauty in his style. But there is real penetration, too. He evokes an entire epoch, which takes on organic shape, form, solidarity, depth." - New York Times, 1943
