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Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the archetypical American maverick.
Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "sivilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. The two bind themselves to one another, becoming intimate friends and agreeing "there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
As Huck learns about love, responsibility, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage through his own soul, culminating in the glorious moment when he decides to "go to hell" rather than return Jim to slavery.
Mark Twain defined classic as "a book which people praise and don't read"; Huckleberry Finn is a happy exception to his own rule. Twain's mastery of dialect, coupled with his famous wit, has made Adventures of Huckleberry Finn one of the most loved and distinctly American classics ever written.
Nominated for a Grammy for his work as co-producer of the five-CD box set The Jazz Singers (1998), Robert O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University and Director of Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies. He is the principal writer of Seeing Jazz (1997), the catalogue for the Smithsonian's exhibit on jazz and literature, and the co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996).
After river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorous pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term. Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor to the literary magazine the Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and the following year traveled to Europe to report on the first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as humorist and lecturer.
After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford, Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twain's literary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed attempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and unrestrained spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.
Following The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, Twain began a literary exploration of his childhood memories of the Mississippi, resulting in a trio of masterpieces --The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), on which he had been working for nearly a decade. Another vein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), while he continued to draw on his travel experiences in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). His close associates in these years included William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and George Washington Cable, as well as the dying Ulysses S. Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs, published by Twain's publishing company in 1885.
For most of the 1890s Twain lived in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death of his daughter Susy in 1896 and the worsening illness of his daughter Jean. The tone of Twain's writing also turned progressively more bitter. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a detective story hinging on the consequences of slavery, was followed by powerful anti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such as 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness' (1901), 'The War Prayer' (1905), and 'King Leopold's Soliloquy' (1905), and by the pessimistic sketches collected in the privately published What Is Man? (1906). The unfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the most uncompromisingly dark of all Twain's later works. In his last years, his financial troubles finally resolved, Twain settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.
Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.
As an African-American who came of age in the 1960s, I first encountered Huckleberry Finn in a fancy children's edition with beautifully printed words and illustrations on thick pages, a volume bought as part of a mail-order series by my ambitious parents. While I do not remember ever opening that particular book-as a junior high schooler I was more drawn to readings about science or my baseball heroes-I do recall a sense of pride that I owned it: that a classic work was part of the furniture of my bedroom and of my life. Later I would discover Twain's ringing definition of a classic as "something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read."
Like many others of that generation-and then I suppose of every American generation that has followed-I was assigned the book as part of a college course. Actually I was taught the book twice, once in a course in modern fiction classics (along with Cervantes, Mann, Conrad, Wolfe, Faulkner), then in a course tracing great themes in American literature, including those of democracy and race. In both these classes, Mark Twain and his Huckleberry Finn appeared as heroic and timeless exemplars of modernism in terms of both literary form and progressive political thought. Here was an American novel told not from the standpoint or in the language of Europe but from the position of the poor but daring and brilliant river-rat Huck, whose tale was spun in lingo we could tell was plain Americanese-why, anybody could tell it, as the boy himself might say.
His was a story of eager flight from the rigidities of daily living, particularly from those institutions that as youngsters we love to hate: family, school, church, the hometown itself. That white Huckleberry's flight from commonplace America included a deep, true friendship with black Jim, who began the novel as a slave in Huck's adopted family, proved Huck's trust of his own lived experience and feelings: his integrity against a world of slavery and prejudice based on skin color. Huck's discovery that he was willing to take the risks involved in assisting Jim in his flight from slavery connected the youngster with the freedom struggle not only of blacks in America but of all Americans seeking to live up to the standards of our most sacred national documents. Here was democracy without the puffery, e pluribus unum at its most radical level of two friends from different racial (but very similar cultural) backgrounds loving one another. Here too was a personal declaration of independence in action, an American revolution (and some would say also a civil war) fought first within Huck's own heart and then along the Mississippi River, the great brown god that many have said stands almost as a third major character in this novel of hard-bought freedom and fraternity, of consciousness and conscientiousness.
I understood these themes as supporting the civil rights movement of that era, and, further, as significant correctives to sixties black nationalism, which too often left too little space, in my view, for black-white friendships and, alas, for humor, without which no revolution I was fighting for was worth the sacrifice. In those days, Huckleberry Finn was also part of my arsenal of defenses against those who questioned my decision to major in literature during the black revolution; for me, it served to justify art itself not just as entertainment but as equipment for living and even as a form of political action. For here was a book whose message of freedom had been so forcefully articulated that it was still sounding clearly all these years later, all over the world. What was I doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond that was as courageous and selfless (and yet as individually self-defining)-as profoundly revolutionary-as Huck's act of helping to rescue Jim?
And yet I do have to say that even in those student days of first discovering this novel, I was troubled by the figure of Jim, with whom, from the very beginning, I found it impossible to identify. Though as a college sophomore or junior I wrote an earnest essay in defense of Jim as a wise man whose "superstitions" could be read as connections to a proud "African" system of communal beliefs and earned adjustments to a turbulent and dangerous new world, it was definitely Huck whose point of view I adopted, while Jim remained a shadowy construction whose buffoonery and will to cooperate with white folks' foolishness embarrassed and infuriated me. Then too the novel's casual uses of the word "nigger" always made my stomach tighten. Years later, when I read about black students, parents, and teachers who objected to the novel's repeated use of this inflammatory word, I knew just what they meant. Lord knows, as a student I had sat in classes where "Nigger Jim" (that much-bandied title never once used by Twain but weirdly adopted by innumerable teachers and scholars, including some of the best and brightest, as we shall see) was discussed by my well-intentioned white classmates and professors whose love of the novel evidently was unimpeded by this brutal language. (Did some of them delight in the license to use this otherwise taboo term? What might that have meant?)
Using some of these ideas about democracy and race (including some of my doubts and questions), for fifteen years I taught Huckleberry Finn at Howard, at Wesleyan, and then at Barnard. And then somehow my battered paperback, my several lectures, and my fat folder of articles by some of the novel's great critics-Eliot, Hemingway, Ellison, Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Henry Nash Smith-all were set aside. I suppose that one problem was simply that the book was taught too much-that students came to me having worn out their own copies already. And too often they seemed to respond not to the book itself but to bits and pieces of the classic hymns of critical (and uncritical) praise, grist for the term-paper-writer and standardized-test-taker's mill. In recent years, when I wanted to teach Twain again, I turned to the novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, with its own tangled problems of racial and national masks and masquerades; to short fiction and essays (including perhaps his funniest piece of writing, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"; see "For Further Reading"), and to The Mysterious Stranger, in which wry, darkly wise Satan drops in on a hamlet very much like the ones of Twain's best-known fictions, including Huckleberry Finn. One of Satan's messages is close to Huck's, too: that it is better to be dead than to endure the ordinary villager's humdrum (and very violent) life.
MCastonguay
Posted June 15, 2010
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - A Review
It's nearly impossible to go through life in America without hearing about Mark Twain's classic novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as well as The Adventures Huckleberry Finn. One might assume that it's necessary to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in order to truly understand the plot of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, fortunately, this is not the case. In fact, the mature humor, controversial topics, and touching moments are in abundance within this iconic story. Issues including slavery, thievery, and dishonesty are dealt with by Huck Finn, the central character, throughout the novel. Although these adventures Huck experiences might sound more appealing to young children, the messages each one offers are ageless, and furthermore, timeless. Written over a hundred years ago, Twain's writing was truly ahead of its time. By using humor as a vehicle to challenge some of society's vices, he keeps readers entertained yet interested. He once said, "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." By poking fun at society, Twain challenges issues including slavery by proving that a black man is just as good, if not better, than a white man. At times, the story is just light-hearted fun, but balances out when the Duke and Dauphin arrive and the ambience darkens. Twain uses a plethora of literary devices to further enhance the reader's adventure. By using colloquialism, readers get a true understanding of the true setting of the Deep South. It's quite possible that one might burst out laughing by their dialect. It's crucial to not assume that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be a light read. The novel is rich with thought provoking ideas about life, therefore making the story relevant to readers today. Ultimately, this novel of a young boy's journey through life should not be missed out on, considering that without reading this book, one would miss the opportunity to read a eternal tale that has warmed the hearts of so many.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 23, 2010
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This rigorous adventure of the sequel of yet another classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, tells the tale of a young boy, Huckleberry Finn (Huck), who seeks an adventure of his own. The adventures of Huck and his companion, Jim - a slave of Huck's widowed guardian, take place alongside the Mississippi River in the Deep South. Previous to when the adventures begins, Huck had lived with a widowed woman who owned Jim (the slave); however, soon after the novel starts, Huck gets kidnapped by his brutal, abusive, alcoholic father and is taken to a shed-like, abandoned cabin. His Pap keeps a close eye on Huck and locks him in, fearing that he would escape or be taken from him. By one day faking his own murder, Huck quickly escapes, and on his way out finds Jim who has also succeeded at running away; they both take off! Living and traveling on a raft, the mismatched yet extremely compatible pair take on the fun-filled, exaggerated adventures, creating a satirical impression of the bizarre culture of the Deep South. Their adventures include coming across a circus, a shipwreck, a funeral, frauds, and more all the while sticking together and becoming the best of friends. The growth of their friendship is one of the most amazing and significant of the things in the novel that withstands the terrible remarks and actions of continued slavery and profound racism that exist. A recurring theme and symbol is that of the Mississippi River, which symbolizes the freedom of the individual (or in this case the inseparable dynamic duo) on which Huck and Jim travel on through their childish pranks, adventures, and nostalgic incidences that they repeatedly encounter. The strong southern twang and diction that Mark Twain heavily incorporates into the novel through the dialect between characters and through the thoughts of Huck himself is remarkable and extraordinarily unique. There was nothing in this novel that seemed out of place or that proved to result in distaste. This timeless classic is one that everyone should read due to the rich symbolism and culture that the reader experiences with Huck and Jim. Overall, a cleverly put together and humorous read that will leave the reader satisfied.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 3, 2009
This book is full of wonder and adventure. I was crazy to read this book always hearing it was so good. Well my ears did not fool me, this book was utterly amazing. From the plot to the language it was incredibly unique and had humor,drama,suspense, and most of all,obviously, adventure. I think everyone should read this classic because they will not be disappointed!
3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 5, 2009
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This book is a guide to growing up. Filled with life lessons, and ethical quandries, Mark Twain weaves a story that is repeated throught mythology and legand. A boy grows to find that the way he was raised may be incorrect. You will be impressed by the complexity of this seemingly simple book.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 30, 2009
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Zackery Eades
The book The adventures of Huckleberry Fin, by Mark Twain is one of the most symbolic books I have ever read. Huck escapes down the river from a horribly abusive father and bad life. Huck finds Jim, a runaway slave, and tells him to leave the island and go down stream with him because people are coming for him. The two travel down stream at night and sleep during the day because there afraid someone would take Jim away if they saw him just because he is black. They encounter many side adventures on there way: getting separated, family feuds, fake dolphins and dukes, and scams. The main event is how Jim gets captured and how Huck throughout the adventure overcomes what he has been taught his entire life, which blacks are not people and are lower than him, and breaks him out of slavery. The book has so many symbols, but one of the main ones is that the river represents freedom and safety but it is ironic that it is taken Jim deeper into slave territory.
I loved this book and enjoyed reading it. It is full of excitement and adventure and it has many life lessons that could be learned. Some that I learned is revenge is a horrible thing to get deep into; with the Grangerfords who where good people but got rapped up in revenge and grudges and all end up dead. I love how Huck as a character changes his views completely and grows up and draws his own conclusions on slavery and acts out on it. The book did not leave the reader hanging at the end which I really like because I do not want to be made to read another book to find out the ending, and it makes me lose interest. The symbolism in this book I find absolutely amazing.
Two books I recommend if you like this book is The adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain and Moby Dick, by Herman Melvilles.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 23, 2007
i loved this sweet piece of juciy book! it made my mouth water with each beatuiful word! it changed my life i never go out anymore i just sit in my room and read it over and over agan untill i pass out. its that good! im telling you! tom is hot and sexi when sweaty
2 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I stopped reading this book and failed the test at school, it was just too boring. I'm ashamed of myself reading it now. This time I was able to see it more real, if that makes any sense. You have to read the book to understand why it is so good. Because you have to spend the time watching the situations he is in, but then seeing the same situation through his eyes.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I purchased this book for my daughter because her school has banned this book along with several others from both the public and private school systems here in the good 'ol US of A.
Many of my daughters teachers repeatably asked me to not purchase this book because this book represents free thought and wasn't politically correct.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IT'S MARK TWAIN...
Yeah the good 'ol suppression is alive and well here in America... :(
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 3, 2003
Hemingway said that American literature started with Huckleberry Finn, and that there has been nothing as good since. I agree. It has been said that you should read this book every ten years, that you will gain something new from it each time. It is funny and wise and a brilliant satire on racism and other stupidities.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 8, 2012
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a great book. I knew that this book was by Mark Twain so I thought it was going to be a little hard but it was not. It did have some hard parts but overall it was not a hard book to read. This book is a sequel to Tom Sawyer. This book is about a young boy living in the age before the Civil War happened. Huckleberry lives with a woman named the Widow and he also has a drunk for a father. One of his closest friends is Tom Sawyer. One day His father steals him and takes him to an area where no one can find them. Because his father drinks and hits him, Huckleberry runs away from his father. On the run Huckleberry meets a slave named Jim also on the run. Over all this book was very good and I enjoyed it. One thing I liked about the book was that it was not that hard to read but at the same time I think that some parts should have been easier.
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Posted March 12, 2012
This book is by far a book worth reading. This messages conveyed in the book and the way the plot come together help to make the book captivating. I would definitly suggest this book to others. I had to read it for school and thought it would be another book that i had to bear with, but instead it turned out to be a great book with an amazing plot
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Posted March 8, 2012
Um....ya you shouldn't tell people how to spell if you can't even spell yourself! And 'swar', well if that's supposed to be "swear", well you spelled that wrong, too. And 'witch' is "which"! And it's "quiet", not 'quit'. Plus in the way that you used "quiet", you should have used "silent" instead. So get better in spelling!
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 14, 2012
It was a good about a adventure but was a little confusing . That was because i was probaly not quite old enough to read it and understand. I think tom sawyer is better for kids and early teens.
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Posted February 2, 2012
It was ok to say it back then. You see mark twain was trying to tell what it was like back then. I forget right now but im pretty sureit means black person witch is why it is swar. Ps the person who wrote are you people dum, it has a b at the end. Dumb. The b is quit
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 19, 2012
This was the book that catapulted me into the world of classic books. This book has action, suspense, a thrill that makes you get so into what your reading you cant just put it down. It has a level of drama that maked you hate the bad guys and love the good guys. It has some political aspects concerning social class of people which was Concern back in that time. This book is a continuation of "Tom Sawyer" .your simply gonna love it. It belongs in everyones library. This is a must read for anyone.
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Posted January 3, 2012
I really want to read the book
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 25, 2011
I read Tom Sawyer in the summer of 6 th grade and finished Huck Finn a couple of weeks ago. It wasn' t as good as Tom Sawyer but was still pretty good. It was way better than a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It was sort of easy for me to read but to understand the book you have to be able to read and get the dialogue. I would reccomend it to anybody who liked Tom Sawyer or Mark Twain books. Anybody from 5th to about 9th grade would probably enjoy it.
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Posted November 11, 2011
I know it says the "n" word but if you new that it was ok to use that word back then and that it wasnt so bother some back then.then i think that you guys wouldnt be complaining about that word
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Posted October 21, 2011
I know there has been a lot of controversy regarding the language in this book. If you read it with the understanding that the language is an integral part of the era, I think the book has even more impact. I haven't read read this book in over 40 years but I am glad I decided to read it again. Even though it is a work of fiction, it delivers a vivid history lesson of the life and attitudes of the pre-civil war era.
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Posted September 4, 2011
Samples stupid but im getting the book aywas. I luved tom sawyer so im getting this book.
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Overview
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: