Œuvres

The works of Mark Twain (1835-1910) are considerable. Three of his works, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the tale dedicated to Old Man River, are accompanied by the entirety of the illustrations that appeared in the original publications. His origins give him access, right in the heart of this immense political, economic and cultural construction that is the 19th century United States, to a crossroads of states and conditions of American life, to which his own inner complexities will respond.

From Tom Sawyer's sensational adventures in a fairy tale village, to the horrors of slavery that drive a mixed-race woman and her son into a madness of mutual destruction (this is the tragedy told in David Wilson), passing through the splendors and decline of Mississippi riverboating, Twain will have done the tour, raising a world of personal experiences to the rank of national heritage. However, it was necessary that at some point in his life and literary career, he felt the call of his lost childhood.

Huckleberry Finn, his masterpiece, provides the key to this upstream return in four stages towards the tiny capital of his memory, where he unearths some of the foundations of American society. The Mississippi microcosm is the refuge of scammers and impostors of all stripes; the slave-owning South, a tragic farce where neither the master nor the slave is what they seem. What is identity exactly? A fiction? Who is still free in the land of the Declaration of Independence? This is, at heart, the question that haunts Huckleberry Finn, a novel written in a new, stunning language, American, to which the dazzling translation by Philippe Jaworski fully does justice.