"This edition prints the first and only text of Mark Twain's masterpiece ever based on his complete manuscript - including its first 663 pages, half the book, lost for over a hundred years until discovered in 1990 in a Los Angeles attic. Using this newly restored manuscript, the editors have recovered thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation which were misread, "corrected," or simply overlooked by Mark Twain's "typewriter copyist"...

Plunged into the brutality of war, Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier, must struggle with the principles of courage, patriotism, and survival, in a collection that also includes other stories and poems.