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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

London/Montreal, 1884

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Literary Classic

Adventure story
Realism

What It’s About

Adventures on the Mississippi

Who doesn’t know this rebellious teenager with the big straw hat? But Mark Twain’s second book about the young Huckleberry Finn – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Saywer – is much more than a children’s story full of adventure and excitement. It is dark in places, dealing with difficult topics such as slavery, lies, betrayal, moral actions and true friendship. It is a biting satire of American South romanticism and a poignant portray of the pre–Civil War American society as the often naive but always perceptive perspective of Huckleberry Finn questions preconceived ideas and accepted prejudices. Yet at the end of his journey down the Mississippi River, he and the runaway slave Jim arrive at the epitome of the American dream: freedom!

Summary

What Happened Before

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ends with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer finding a large amount of money that a band of robbers had hidden. They each get $6,000 – a huge sum for the boys – which Judge Thatcher invests for them at the bank. The Widow Douglas and her extremely conservative and religious sister Miss Watson adopt Huckleberry, but he struggles with their attempts to “sivilize” him and runs away. Tom persuades him to return. He does, but Huck isn’t happy.

Life at the Widow’s House

While Huckleberry likes some of the luxuries his new life offers, he misses the freedom of being able to do and wear what he wants. The new clothes make him feel “cramped up,” he struggles with the strict time schedule at the Widow Douglas’s house, and he doesn’t see the point of saying his prayers or reading the Bible. One night, just as Huckleberry is feeling low, Tom appears in the garden and together they steal away. Tom has great plans to start a band of robbers with Huck and a few other boys. Tom makes each of the boys swear an oath of allegiance...

About the Author

The author known as Mark Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. He grew up in Hannibal, a small town next to the Mississippi River. The town became the blueprint for Tom Sawyer’s adventures. Clemens’s father died in 1847, and, at the age of 12, Clemens was forced to leave school and start an apprenticeship as a typesetter. In 1851, he got a job with the Hannibal Journal. He left when he turned 17, moving to New York and then Philadelphia, where he started writing his first travel accounts. From 1857 to 1860, he worked as boat pilot on the Mississippi River. It was from this job that he took his pseudonym. In piloting language, “mark twain” means the water depth at which a Mississippi boat could make safe passage. The experience he gained during this time informed his writing. In 1861, he briefly served as a volunteer in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. One year later, he became a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, where he first used his pseudonym. In 1864, he moved to San Francisco. Two years later, his job as a reporter took him to Hawaii, and in 1867, he traveled to Europe and Palestine. In 1870, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, and she started taking an active role in his writing, helping with editing. The couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Clemens wrote his best-known novels, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his autobiography Life on the Mississippi (1883). Arguably, however, his most important work is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Clemens set up a publishing business, but its eventual collapse left him financially ruined. To earn money and pay off his debts, he went on an around-the-world lecture tour, which also provided him with material for his last travel book, Around the Equator (1897). While in London, Clemens learned that his daughter died from spinal meningitis. The family stayed in London for an extended period of mourning. They returned to America, but both Samuel and Olivia continued to struggle with health problems. Olivia died in 1904, followed six years later by Samuel on April 21, 1910.