ABSTRACT
Mark Twain worked on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at intervals over a period of seven years, from 1876 to 1883. During this time he wrote two considerable books (A Tramp Abroad and The Prince and the Pauper), expanded “Old Times on the Mississippi” into Life on the Mississippi, and gathered various shorter pieces into three other volumes. But this is all essentially minor work. The main line of his development lies in the long preoccupation with the Matter of Hannibal and the Matter of the River that is recorded in “Old Times” and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and reaches a climax in his book about “Tom Sawyer’s Comrade. Scene: The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago.”
