Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece - Hardcover

"A most remarkable book. "A Brain Wider Than the Sky" is learned, witty, allusive, and poetic -- and migraine becomes, for Levy, a window into the whole landscape of body and mind, health and disease, and the sheer complexity of being alive."--Oliver Sacks "author of Migraine and Musicophilia "

"This is a wonderful hybrid of a book about that most metaphysical of pains, the migraine headache. Part memoir, part historical inquiry, part philosophical meditation, "A Brain Wider Than the Sky" takes its reader on a physical and psychological journey and shows us that beauty and tranquility can be found in the least likely of places."--Ann Packer "author of Songs With out Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier "

"Andrew Levy has turned migraines into a window on the human condition. His epic, erudite, obsessive, despairingly isolated battle with this half-mystical demon, ranging across civilization but always ending up in a dark room, has eerie resonance for those who do not suffer -- until the surprise ending, whereupon we see the common ground."--Suzannah Lessard "author of Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family "

"[Levy] collects headaches like rare butterflies, and he has a rare, possibly singular gift for fitting words to them...His eloquence is all the more remarkable because migraines are a sinkhole for language....encourages us to generalize from his example to take in the true dimensions of what is still a largely silent epidemic."--Lev Grossman "Time "

"I love this book. It's wonderful, dangerous, compelling, nerve-rattling, and absolutely brilliant. It is intimate and yet of enormous scope, it is funny and yet deeply vulnerable, and, most important, it is just so smart as it portrays both the larger public history of migraine and the intensely personal history of Levy's own experiences with this debilitating and ongoing neurological event."--Fred Leebron "author of In the Middle of All This and Five Figures "

Praise for "A Brain Wider Than the Sky"

"A most remarkable book. A Brain Wider Than the Sky is learned, witty, allusive, and poetic -- and migraine becomes, for Levy, a window into the whole landscape of body and mind, health and disease, and the sheer complexity of being alive."--Oliver Sacks "author of Migraine and Musicophilia "

"A minstrel show? A bad boy book? "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is--complexly, contradictorily, contentiously--both of these. So argues Andrew Levy in his dazzling and engaging" Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece." Drawing on a broad range of nineteenth-century newspapers and also biographical materials about Twain, Levy unearths how Twain's novel speaks to the ways in which we think about race (a connection much discussed in recent decades) and childhood (almost never)."--Beverly Lyon Clark, author of Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children s Literature in America"

Praise for "A Brain Wider Than the Sky"
"A most remarkable book. A Brain Wider Than the Sky is learned, witty, allusive, and poetic -- and migraine becomes, for Levy, a window into the whole landscape of body and mind, health and disease, and the sheer complexity of being alive."--Oliver Sacks "author of Migraine and Musicophilia "

"Andrew Levy's beautiful memoir, "A Brain Wider Than the Sky," is welcome relief....an affecting, readable account of the pain of migraine and the weird wonder of it. Levy seamlessly glides from the experience of his own suffering to broader neurological and historical realms...[his] prose shines...beautiful description and compelling research...unflinching self-scrutiny is what elevates A Brain Wider Than the Sky beyond many less successful memoirs of illness....the irrefutable reality is that Levy's suffering is not his alone, and the consequences of that fact are where the heart of this fine book lies."--Christine Montross "The Washington Post "

"Andrew Levy has done something that even Mark Twain's greatest admirers might not have thought possible: he has given us fresh eyes with which to encounter America's best-loved and most notorious novel. This artfully written and profoundly engaging book offers a new appreciation for Mark Twain's art and, just as provocatively, a new understanding of American culture's enduring fascination with his greatest work."--Henry B. Wonham, author of Mark Twain and the Tall Tale and Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism

A provocative, exuberant, and deeply researched investigation into Mark Twain’s writing of Huckleberry Finn, which turns on its head everything we thought we knew about America’s favorite icon of childhood.

In Huck Finn’s America, award-winning biographer Andrew Levy shows how modern readers have been misunderstanding Huckleberry Finn for decades. Twain’s masterpiece, which still sells tens of thousands of copies each year and is taught more than any other American classic, is often discussed either as a carefree adventure story for children or a serious novel about race relations, yet Levy argues convincingly it is neither. Instead, Huck Finn was written at a time when Americans were nervous about youth violence and “uncivilized” bad boys, and a debate was raging about education, popular culture, and responsible parenting — casting Huck’s now-celebrated “freedom” in a very different and very modern light. On issues of race, on the other hand, Twain’s lifelong fascination with minstrel shows and black culture inspired him to write a book not about civil rights, but about race’s role in entertainment and commerce, the same features upon which much of our own modern consumer culture is also grounded. In Levy’s vision, Huck Finn has more to say about contemporary children and race that we have ever imagined—if we are willing to hear it.

An eye-opening, groundbreaking exploration of the character and psyche of Mark Twain as he was writing his most famous novel, Huck Finn’s America brings the past to vivid, surprising life, and offers a persuasive—and controversial—argument for why this American classic deserves to be understood anew.