As with "The Canterbury Tales," "Ulysses" and many other works, no definitive version of "Huckleberry Finn" exists. Re-editing old literature is a long, difficult tradition. "I have no problem with the decision made by the Berkeley press, but our feelin was to not to make our readers wait for the small print in the back to see the new material." "We thought it was interesting to put the story where it would have gone in the text," says Daniel Menaker, senior literary editor at Random House. "But from what we can tell, he decided the story didn't work." "If we thought he had been forced to remove it, we would have kept it in the body of the text," Hirst says. Random House, for example, places Jim's ghost story in the actual narrative. The Random House version, published in 1996, and the current Berkeley edition use the same rediscovered material, but in different ways. "In the previous edition, we only had half of the original manuscript. "When we say authoritative, we mean as authoritative as you can be at the time," Hirst explains. Meanwhile, an earlier Berkeley publication is also called "The Only Authoritative Text." The current Berkeley book is advertised as "The Only Authoritative Text," but it must compete with a Random House version billed as "The Only Comprehensive Edition" and endorsed by Twain's literary estate. It's enough to confuse the average bookstore browser. Like rival explorers in search of a promised land, publishers keep on issuing new editions of Twain's novel, with each supposedly nearing the elusive, but irresistible claim to the "definitive" text. The Berkeley editors aren't the first to say this, and probably won't be the last. CBS News Sunday Morning Contributor Janet Maslin suggests books to pack in your beach bag and a panel of experts assembled by National Geographic Adventure has listed its 100 best adventure stories of all time.
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