A runaway boy and an enslaved man share a raft, and American fiction changes
Mark Twain let a barely schooled Missouri boy tell his own story in his own dialect, and the result became one of the Great American Novels. Huck Finn drifts down the Mississippi beside Jim, fleeing slavery, and ends up choosing friendship over everything his society taught him was right.
The novel appeared in Britain in December 1884 and reached American readers in February 1885. It follows directly from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but the voice is new: Huck narrates in the first person, and the whole book is written in vernacular speech, something almost no major American work had attempted before. Twain set it in the 1840s, in a slave-holding South that had vanished more than two decades before publication, which gave him room to satirise attitudes, above all racism, that had outlived the old order.
The plot begins in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Huck has money from the earlier book's treasure, two guardians trying to civilise him, and a violent, drunken father who wants the cash. After Pap locks him in a cabin, Huck stages his own death and hides on Jackson's Island. There he meets Jim, who ran from Miss Watson after learning she meant to sell him. Their plan is to float to Cairo, Illinois, a free state, but after a night separated in fog they realise they have drifted past it and are carried ever deeper south.
Along the river Huck watches a bloody family feud, gets conscripted into the frauds of two con men calling themselves the King and the Duke, and finally learns they have sold Jim to a farming family, the Phelpses. The moral peak comes here: Huck decides to rescue Jim even though he honestly believes it will send him to hell. Tom Sawyer then turns the rescue into an elaborate game, and it emerges that Miss Watson had already freed Jim in her will.
Critics praised the book for reshaping children's literature with its portrait of boyhood, yet it has drawn fire from the start. Early reviewers objected to its coarse language, and through the twentieth century many readers condemned its racial stereotypes and its constant use of a racial slur, even as others argued that the book, and Huck himself, stand against racism.
Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
