The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Name: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Rating: 3.83 (1361062 reviews)

by Mark Twain

First published 1884

Amazon

3.8(1,361,062)

Huckleberry Finn escapes his violent father by staging his own death and hiding on Jackson’s Island, where he encounters Jim, an enslaved man fleeing the threat of sale away from his family. They set out by raft toward the Ohio River, but fog, currents and accidents carry them deeper into the slaveholding Mississippi Valley instead of toward freedom.

Their journey passes wrecked steamboats, armed family feuds, fraudulent performers and communities willing to exploit strangers and return Jim to slavery. Huck has been taught that helping Jim is theft and sin, yet experience repeatedly contradicts that lesson. Set roughly between 1835 and 1845, the novel turns a river adventure into an examination of conscience, racial violence and the social institutions that make an ordinary act of loyalty appear criminal.