Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Introduction

Huck, a vagabond boy of thirteen or so, has been taken in by a kindly widow who makes him wear clean clothes, eat at set times and read the Bible, and he is miserable. His drunken father carries him off, locks him in a cabin by the river and beats him. Huck fakes his own murder and escapes to an island in the Mississippi, where he meets Jim, a slave who has run away on hearing that his owner means to sell him down the river. The two float downstream on a raft, encountering two families locked in a blood feud, a pair of swindlers calling themselves a duke and a king, and lynch mobs. By the law and the church teaching of the day, helping a slave escape is a sin, and Huck's conscience struggles again and again; at last he tears up the letter he has written betraying Jim and says, 'All right, then, I'll go to hell.' Hemingway said: 'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.'