Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain that ranks among the greatest works in American literature. Its full title is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The novel was published in 1884 in London and in 1885 in the United States. Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn as a sequel to his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Each work describes the adventures of a boy living in a small town in Missouri in the mid-1800’s.
Huckleberry Finn narrates the adventures of Huck and the runaway enslaved man Jim as they float down the Mississippi River on a raft. The story is told from Huck’s point of view. Twain used realistic language in the novel, making Huck’s speech sound like actual conversation and imitating a variety of dialects to bring the other characters to life. Tom Sawyer, the hero of the earlier novel, reappears in some chapters, and his antics provide the familiar humor for which Twain was known.
Twain contrasted the natural life on the river—where a white boy and a Black man can become friends—with the hypocrisy, moral decay, and corruption of society along the shore. Through Huck’s adventures and observations, the reader learns about the value and dignity of every human being. Twain also satirized styles of writing that dominated earlier American literature.
Twain’s story about Huck Finn, the son of a town drunkard, became a controversial book. Huck’s casual morals and careless grammar disturbed many readers when the book first appeared. Some modern readers object to Huck’s simple acceptance of the principles of slavery and his use of racial stereotypes. For his time, however, Twain was liberal on racial issues. The deeper themes of Huckleberry Finn argue for the fundamental equality and universal aspirations of people of all races.
