The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
language
(The Classics, June 11, 2020)
Mark Twainâs tale of a boyâs picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work has done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the âsivilizingâ Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous âDukeâ and âDaupinâ. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents â of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huckâs struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring frienship with Jim.All modern American literature comes from⌠âHuckleberry Finnâ. Itâs the best book weâve had. âErnest HemingwayProbably the most stupendous event of my whole life. âHenry Louis Mencken[Huck is] one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction, not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet⌠âT. S. EliotThe mark of how good âHuckleberry Finnâ has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page, awkward here, sensational there â absolutely the equal of one of those rare incredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade. âNorman MailerThe first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs. âWilliam Faulkner