Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• 1. Introduction

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  "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." That is how Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins. Mark Twain settled on that line only after writing it three different ways. He first put down "You will not know about me", then "You do not know about me", before arriving at a boy's own crooked grammar. The novel reached readers in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. It is told entirely by Huck himself, a boy of "thirteen or fourteen or along there". Why would a book later named among the Great American Novels be barred from libraries the moment it appeared? Why would Ernest Hemingway insist that all of modern American literature came from it, then warn readers to stop before the final chapters? And how did a story about a runaway boy and a runaway slave drifting down the Mississippi become a permanent argument that the country is still having?

• 2. A Sound Heart In Conflict

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  Huck believes he will go to hell, and he chooses it anyway. When he learns that Jim has been sold to the Phelpses, he vows to free him despite that conviction. This is the moral hinge of the book. Huck lives in conflict with the received values of the society around him. He cannot consciously argue against those values, even inside his own head. He acts instead on his own sense of Jim's friendship and human worth, against everything he has been taught. Twain explained the design in his lecture notes. He proposed that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience". He described the novel as "a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat". To press the point, Twain has Huck's own father enslave him, isolate him, and beat him in a remote cabin. When Huck escapes, he immediately meets Jim, who is "illegally" doing the same thing. The two are treated in radically different ways. Judith Loftus takes pity on Huck, whom she assumes is a runaway apprentice, while boasting that her husband has sent the hounds after Jim. Many critics consider Loftus the best drawn female character in the novel, even though she plays only a small part.

• 3. Voices On The River

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  It was among the first major American works written throughout in vernacular English, and the choice nearly defined Twain's life as a writer. Paul Needham supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's in New York in 1991. He described what the pages reveal: "What you see is Clemens' attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". The novel carries colorful description of the people and places along the Mississippi River. It was credited with "changing the course of children's literature" in the United States for its "deeply felt portrayal of boyhood". Henry Nash Smith placed the achievement in its moment. He argued the book opened "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power", and made vernacular language, with "new sources of pleasure and new energy", available to American prose and poetry in the twentieth century. Some scholars push the claim further, into the country's culture itself. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, whose 1990s book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices contends that by "limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery", white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core".

• 4. Banned From The Slums

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  The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts threw the book out within months of its American release. The Boston Transcript recorded the committee's verdict. One member would not call it immoral, but thought it held "but little humor, and that of a very coarse type", and pronounced it "the veriest trash". The whole committee judged it "rough, coarse, and inelegant", a book "more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people". Louisa May Alcott joined the attack, saying that if Twain could not "think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them". In 1905 the Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book. The cited reasons were "bad word choice" and the obscene detail that Huck had "not only itched but scratched". Asked about the matter by a Brooklyn librarian, Twain answered with a straight face. He claimed he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn "for adults exclusively", and that it distressed him to find boys and girls reading them, since "the mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean". He blamed the guardians who had "compelled" him to read "an unexpurgated Bible" before he was 15. Norman Mailer, writing in 1984, concluded the novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded", and that the early climate could hardly anticipate the praise to come.

• 5. The N-Word On Trial

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  A Virginia school administrator called it, in 1982, the "most grotesque example of racism I've ever seen in my life". The charge centers on the word "nigger", common in Twain's time and since turned taboo, which appears frequently across the novel. According to the American Library Association, the book was the fifth-most frequently challenged in the United States during the 1990s. The fights kept coming. In 2003, high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, asked the Renton School District to drop it from classroom use, though not from public libraries. Two curriculum committees kept it on the 11th grade curriculum after review. In 2009, a white Washington state teacher named John Foley wrote an opinion column in the Seattle Post Intelligencer arguing that all "novels that use the 'N-word' repeatedly need to go". In 2016, a public school district in Virginia removed the book, along with To Kill a Mockingbird, over their racial slurs. The argument over Jim runs underneath all of it. Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia holds that Twain could not fully rise above the stereotypes white readers expected, and so leaned on minstrel-show comedy at Jim's expense. In 1955, CBS handled the problem by deleting all mention of slavery from a televised version and cutting the character of Jim entirely.

• 6. The Argument Over The Ending

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  Ernest Hemingway told readers exactly where to put the book down. He declared that "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn and hailed it as "the best book we've had". Then came the warning: "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." The complaint is about the closing chapters, where Tom Sawyer arrives and leads Huck through elaborate machinations to "rescue" a Jim who is already legally free. Critics charge that the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" once Jim is detained. The African-American writer Ralph Ellison answered Hemingway directly. He argued that Hemingway "completely missed the structural, symbolic and moral necessity" of the part where the boys rescue Jim, and that "it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance". Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers, in his biography Mark Twain: A Life, splits the difference, calling the book "a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters". The mercy of the ending belongs to Jim, not the boys. When Tom is wounded during the escape, Jim refuses to flee and stays to tend him, and is arrested and returned to the Phelpses.

• 7. Rewriting Twain

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  In 2011, NewSouth Books printed an edition that replaced "nigger" with "slave", a word that does not properly apply to a freed man. The publisher's stated aim was to give readers the choice of a "sanitized" version. Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be friendlier for classrooms than an outright ban. Publisher Suzanne La Rosa framed it as a service: "At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers." Not everyone accepted the trade. Scholar Thomas Wortham objected that the new edition "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'" Later writers chose to answer the book rather than edit it. Percival Everett's James, published in 2024 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, retells the plot from Jim's point of view. The graphic novel Big Jim and the White Boy, by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson, makes Big Jim the primary protagonist and Huck his sidekick. It sends them through the Civil War to rescue Jim's enslaved wife and children, and turns them into Underground Railroad agents across the generations. Jim's wife had a voice even earlier, in Nancy Rawles's 2005 novel My Jim, narrated largely by Sadie.

• 8. The Manuscript In The Trunk

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  Twain wrote the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883, working off and on across those years. He began with a few pages removed from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and a manuscript he first titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. He had meant to follow Huck into adulthood, lost interest, set the pages aside, and returned to them after a trip down the Hudson River. The first illustrations were done by E. W. Kemble, then a young artist working for Life magazine, hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Because Kemble could afford only one model, most of the pictures were drawn by guesswork. One of them caused real trouble. An engraver, never identified, made a last-minute change to the plate of Kemble's picture of old Silas Phelps that drew attention to the man's groin. Thirty thousand copies had already been printed before the obscenity was caught, and a new plate was cut to repair them. The manuscript itself nearly vanished. In 1885 the Buffalo Public Library curator James Fraser Gluck asked Twain to donate it, and Twain did. Half the pages were later thought lost by the printer. In 1991 the missing first half surfaced in a steamer trunk owned by Gluck's descendants. The library claimed it and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to show the recovered treasure.