"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
"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
