Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Front Matter and First Paragraph

   PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

   BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

   IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

   I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

   THE AUTHOR.

   SCENE: The Mississippi Valley
TIME: Forty to Fifty Years Ago

    YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

        To read the entire e-text of the novel, and to see engraved illustrations which purport to be portraits of "Huck" and the "Widow's Place" and other persons and places Twain invented, click here to go to the University of Virginia's E-Text Initiative Edition.