The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(4.6 / 5)

The tale of a boy’s picaresque trip down the Mississippi on a raft by Mark Twain expressed the American border’s voice and perspective like no other work has done before. He embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous ‘Duke’ and ‘Daupin’ as Huck escapes from his drunken father and the ‘civilizing’ Widow Douglas with the fugitive slave Jim. Slavery, adult power and, above all, Huck’s struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and lasting friendship with Jim, are more serious undercurrents underneath the exploits, though.

All modern literature in the United States comes from… “Huckleberry Finn.” This is the finest book we’ve seen. -Ernest Hemingway
It was undoubtedly the most amazing experience of my entire life. Henry Louis Mencken —
[Huck is] one of fiction’s permanent symbolic figures, not incapable of taking a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet… Eliot’s
The indication of how strong ‘Huckleberry Finn’ has to be is that it can be compared to a variety of our best modern American novels and it stands up page by page, uncomfortable here, fantastic there, absolutely the same as one of those rare great first novels that come out in a decade once or twice. -Norman Mailer
The first truly American writer, and we are all his heirs ever since. -William Faulkner