The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain - 1884
Introduction
Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is told from the point of view of Huck Finn, a barely literate teen who fakes his own death to escape his abusive, drunken father. He encounters a runaway slave named Jim, and the two embark on a raft journey down the Mississippi River. Through satire, Twain skewers the somewhat unusual definitions of "right" and "wrong" in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South, noting among other things that the "right" thing to do when a slave runs away is to turn him in, not help him escape. Twain also paints a rich portrait of a the slave Jim, a character unequaled in American literature: he is guileless, rebellious, genuine, superstitious, warmhearted, ignorant, and astute all at the same time.
The book is a sequel to another of the author's successful adventure novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, originally published in 1876. Although The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is very much a "boys' novel"—humorous, suspenseful, and intended purely as entertainment—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also addresses weighty issues such as slavery, prejudice, hypocrisy, and morality.
After Twain finished writing the first half of the novel, he expressed doubts about the book's potential success.
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