The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Barry Blitt is a presentation of the life of Mark Twain, including his folksey humor as presented by his most famous character. The title is exactly that, The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn, as he remembers Samuel Clemens. It’s all quite inky looking, especially most of that title at the top with its scratchy font done up in deep blue ink and some of it (along with Huck’s name) in a brown to match Huck’s pants and hair. The cover is pale with a pale blue river for Huck, barefoot in rolled-up brown trousers, a slingshot in his back pocket, a wide-brimmed and raggedy straw hat, his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up as he poles his way along with that fountain pen, standing on a raft of a book that features Mark Twain himself with the author’s and illustrator’s names below Twain’s portrait. Mark Twain, a.k.a., Samuel Clemens, is the subject of this picture biography.

It’s fun to “hear” Huck a’talkin’ away and bringing the time to life. It could be interesting to match up world events with these years to see what was happening when Twain was. There’s a very handy list of dates that relate to the important events in Twain’s life at the very end. Burleigh slides in some commentary about critics not liking how Huck’s dialogue was written, so undereducated and all as well as Twain’s anger about how blacks were treated. It literally is Huck talkin’ Twain’s life and how it relates to his own. The color comes in with Huck’s language and sentence structure. The kids will adore all those splotches! And the “Warning to the Reader” page is quite handy to explore the use of dialect with the kids…if you can figger it out from the variety of fonts and sizes! You can hear Huck’s larnin’ and status so easily through his speech.īe sure to explore the front endpapers with all those ink sketches of times in Twain’s life. Now this would be a handy tome for you writers wantin’ to write dialect for your characters. A standalone biography about Mark Twain as told by Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry finn book cover