Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was published in Britain in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Huck, a boy of about thirteen in a Mississippi River town, flees his drunken father and falls in with Jim, a man who has run from slavery. They drift on a raft down the river, meeting con men, feuding families and violent mobs. Huck, who has been taught that helping Jim is a sin, finally decides to help him anyway.¹²

Twain wrote it in fits and starts from 1876 to 1883, drawing on his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and on his work as a river pilot. It is set before the Civil War, but it was written in the years after Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the promises of freedom to black Americans were being betrayed, and its sharp satire of slavery and racism reflects that. The story echoes the picaresque tradition of Don Quixote, in which a wandering hero meets a series of scenes of social satire. The key choice is Twain's use of Huck's own first-person speech, in regional dialects, rather than literary English.¹²³

The book was banned by the Concord Public Library in 1885 as coarse, and it has been repeatedly challenged since, now largely over its use of racial slurs. It remains widely taught. Ernest Hemingway wrote that all modern American literature comes from this one book.¹³