Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

About this book

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain’s sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, narrated by the boy who was Tom’s friend in the earlier book. Twain began it in 1876, set it aside for several years, and finished it in 1883. It was published in Britain at the end of 1884 and in the United States early in 1885 by the firm Twain had set up with his nephew-in-law, Charles L. Webster. The first edition carried illustrations by E. W. Kemble.

The novel is among the most studied and most contested books in American literature. It was written entirely in Huck’s voice, in a dialect prose that had rarely been sustained over a whole novel, and it took an uneducated, unwashed boy seriously as a moral observer. It has also been challenged and removed from school reading lists repeatedly, first for its coarseness and later for its use of racial slurs and its portrayal of Jim. Both the admiration and the objections are part of its history.

The story

Huck, now living with the Widow Douglas and being civilized against his will, is taken back by his violent, drunken father, who locks him in a cabin in the woods. Huck fakes his own death and escapes to Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi, where he finds Jim, a slave belonging to the widow’s sister, who has run away after overhearing that he is to be sold down the river.

The two set off together on a raft, meaning to reach Cairo, Illinois, where Jim can head north to free territory. They miss it in the fog. The rest of the book follows the raft downstream through a series of episodes on shore, including a family feud, a lynch mob, and a long stretch in the company of two con men who call themselves the Duke and the King, while Huck wrestles with what he has been taught about helping a runaway slave.

Themes and historical context

Twain set the book in the 1830s or 1840s, before the Civil War, but wrote it in the 1880s, as Reconstruction collapsed and the legal position of Black Americans in the South was being rolled back. The novel’s satire of slaveholding society, its churches, its codes of honor, and its casual violence, reads differently with that in mind. Huck’s great moral crisis turns on the fact that everything he has been taught tells him helping Jim is a sin, and his decision to do it anyway is the center of the book.

The river itself is the novel’s main image of freedom, and the episodes on shore show what that freedom is an escape from. The book’s humor ranges from slapstick to very dark, and the Duke and King sequences, in which the two swindlers prey on small-town credulity, are some of the sharpest social satire Twain wrote.

The final section, in which Tom Sawyer reappears and turns Jim’s situation into an elaborate game, has divided critics since the early twentieth century. Many consider it a failure of nerve; others argue it is the point.

Who should read it

The novel runs to around 110,000 words in forty-three chapters. Huck’s dialect takes a chapter or two to settle into, and Jim’s speech, rendered in a heavier dialect, is harder for modern readers and has been criticized as caricature. The racial slur that appears throughout is a serious obstacle for many readers and should be expected. For those prepared for that, the book offers a narrator of real moral intelligence and a picture of the pre-war South that no other novel matches. Readers who want a lighter book should start with Tom Sawyer.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #76 was prepared by David Widger. The catalog lists E. W. Kemble as illustrator; the Gutenberg edition includes his illustrations from the first American edition.