Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry Finn, as depicted by E. W. Kemble in the original 1884 edition of the book

In St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shore of the Mississippi River, during the 1830s–1840s, Huckleberry "Huck" Finn has come into a considerable sum of money following The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and is placed under the strict guardianship of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. The women attempt to civilize him, but Huck prefers to have adventures with his friend Tom Sawyer. His father, "Pap", an abusive alcoholic, returns to town and tries to appropriate Huck's fortune. When this fails, Pap kidnaps Huck and imprisons him in a cabin in the woods.

To escape his father, Huck elaborately fakes his own murder and sets off downriver. He settles on Jackson's Island, where he reunites with Miss Watson's slave Jim, who ran away after overhearing she was planning to sell him. Huck decides to go downriver with Jim to Cairo, in the free state of Illinois. After heavy flooding, the two find a timber raft and an entire house floating down the river. Inside, Jim finds a body that has been shot to death but prevents Huck from viewing the corpse.[5] Huck sneaks into town and discovers there is a reward out for Jim, who is suspected of killing Huck; the two flee on their raft.

Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamer, the Walter Scott, where two thieves are discussing murdering a third. Finding that their own raft has drifted away, Huck and Jim flee in the thieves' boat before being noticed. They find their own raft again and sink the thieves' boat, keeping their loot. Huck tricks a watchman into going to rescue the stranded thieves to assuage his conscience. Huck and Jim are separated in a fog, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is disappointed when Huck admits the truth. Huck is surprised by Jim's strong feelings and apologizes.

Jim and Huck on their raft, by E. W. Kemble

Huck is conflicted about supporting a runaway slave, which he has been taught is a sin. He decides to turn Jim in, but when two white men seeking runaway slaves come upon the raft, he lies to them and they leave. Jim and Huck realize they have passed Cairo. With no way of getting back upriver, they decide to continue downriver. The raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two.

On the riverbank, Huck meets the Grangerford family, who are engaged in a 30-year blood feud with the Shepherdson family, although no one remembers why the feud originally started. After a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson boy, the feud boils over and all the Grangerford males are shot and killed in a Shepherdson ambush. Huck escapes and is reunited with Jim, who has recovered and repaired the raft.

Downriver, Jim and Huck are joined by two confidence men claiming to be a King and a Duke. The swindlers rope Huck and Jim into playing along with a series of scams. In one town, the swindlers scam the townsfolk with a short and overpriced performance. On the third night, the grifters flee before the townsfolk can take revenge. In the next town, the swindlers impersonate brothers of recently-deceased Peter Wilks to steal his estate. Huck tries to retrieve the money for Wilks's orphaned nieces. Two men claiming to be Wilks' real brothers arrive, causing an uproar. Huck tries to flee in the confusion, but is caught by the grifters. Eventually he escapes, but finds that the swindlers have sold Jim to the Phelps family plantation. Huck vows to free Jim, despite believing he will go to hell as a consequence.

The Phelps family mistakes Huck for their nephew Tom, who is expected for a visit, and Huck plays along. It turns out their nephew is Tom Sawyer. When he arrives, he plays along with Huck's story and develops a theatrical plan to free Jim. During the escape, Tom is wounded. Jim tends to him instead of escaping, and is arrested and returned to the plantation.[6] Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals the boys' true identities. She explains that Miss Watson has died, freeing Jim in her will. Tom admits he knew this, but wanted to "rescue" Jim in style.[7] Jim says that Huck's father was the dead man they found in the floating house, so Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he intends to flee west to Indian Territory to escape being adopted by the Phelps family.

Tom Sawyer stealing spoons on the Phelpses' farm

The "King" and the "Duke", by E. W. Kemble

In order of appearance:

• Tom Sawyer is Huck's best friend and peer, the main character of other Twain novels and the leader of the town boys in adventures. He is mischievous, good-hearted, and "the best fighter and the smartest kid in town".[8]
• Huckleberry Finn, "Huck" to his friends, is a boy about "thirteen or fourteen or along there" years old (Chapter 17). He has been brought up by his father, the town drunk, and has a difficult time fitting into society. In the novel, Huck's good nature offers a contrast to the inadequacies and inequalities in society.
• Widow Douglas is the kind woman who takes Huck in after he helped save her from a violent home invasion. She tries her best to "sivilize" (civilize) Huck, believing it is her Christian duty to do so.
• Miss Watson is the widow's sister, a tough old spinster who also lives with them. She is fairly hard on Huck, causing him to resent her a good deal. Mark Twain may have drawn inspiration for this character from several people he knew in his life.[8]
• Jim is Miss Watson's physically large but mild-mannered slave. Huck becomes very close to Jim when they reunite after Jim flees Miss Watson's household to seek refuge from slavery, and Huck and Jim become fellow travelers on the Mississippi River. Jim is shown to be honorable, perceptive, and intelligent, despite his lack of education and prejudice he faces.
• "Pap" Finn is Huck's father, a brutal alcoholic drifter. He resents Huck getting any kind of education. His only genuine interest in his son involves begging or extorting money to feed his alcohol addiction.
• Judith Loftus plays a small part in the novel — being the kind and perceptive woman whom Huck talks to in order to find out about the search for Jim — but many critics believe her to be the best drawn female character in the novel.[8]
• The Grangerfords, an aristocratic Kentuckian family headed by the sexagenarian Colonel Saul Grangerford, take Huck in after he is separated from Jim on the Mississippi. Huck becomes close friends with the youngest male of the family, Buck Grangerford, who is Huck's age. By the time Huck meets them, the Grangerfords have been engaged in an age-old blood feud with another local family, the Shepherdsons.
• The Duke and the King are two otherwise unnamed con artists whom Huck and Jim take aboard their raft just before the start of their Arkansas adventures. They pose as the long-lost Duke of Bridgewater and the long-dead Louis XVII of France in an attempt to over-awe Huck and Jim, who quickly come to recognize them for what they are, but cynically pretend to accept their claims to avoid conflict.
• Doctor Robinson is the only man who recognizes that the King and Duke are phonies when they pretend to be British. He warns the townspeople, but they ignore him.
• Mary Jane, Joanna, and Susan Wilks are the three young nieces of their wealthy guardian, Peter Wilks, who has recently died. The Duke and the King try to steal their inheritance by posing as Peter's estranged brothers from England but are eventually thwarted.
• Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps buy Jim from the Duke and the King. She is a loving, high-strung "farmer's wife", and he a plodding old man, both a farmer and a preacher. Huck poses as their nephew, Tom Sawyer, after he parts from the conmen. His intention is to try and help Jim escape.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity; what it means to be free and civilized; and the ideas of humanity and social responsibility in the changing landscape of America. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance. This argument is supported by incidents early in the novel where Huck deliberately "tricks" Jim, taking advantage of his gullibility and Jim still remains loyal to him.[9][10]

But this novel is also Huck's 'coming of age' story where he overcomes his initial biases and forms a deeper bond with Jim. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives. Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience" and goes on to describe the novel as "a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".[11]

To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him. When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim.[12]

Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, "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." It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and Black culture in the United States.[13]

The original illustrations were done by E. W. Kemble, at the time a young artist working for Life magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that:

Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace ... Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage.[14]

As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright.[15]

Mark Twain

Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson River, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade).[16]

Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of Huck Finn three times. He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "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."[17] The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting.[18][19]

A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.[20]

Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and the United Kingdom, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States.[21] The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble's picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps' groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies.[22][23]

In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library's curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In 1991, the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure.[24]

In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain's already established reputation as a "professional humorist", having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the "dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn illustrated "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century."[25]

In this scene illustrated by E. W. Kemble, Jim has given Huck up for dead and when he reappears thinks he must be a ghost.

While it is clear that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in The New York Times in 1984, concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded." In fact, Mailer writes: "the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.[26]

Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain's time and today, defenders of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and 'censors', thus equating the complaints about the book's 'coarseness' from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights."[13]

Upon issue of the American edition in 1885, several libraries banned it from their shelves.[27] The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:

The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.[28]

Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book's publication as well, 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".[29][30]

In 1905, New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied:

I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.[31]

Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained.[32] Although Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn, and hailed it as "the best book we've had", he cautioned, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys [sic]. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."[33][34] The African-American writer Ralph Ellison argued that "Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance."[35] Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography (Mark Twain: A Life) that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters", in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim.[36]

In his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain "could be uninhibitedly vulgar", and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author's "humor was not for most women". However, Hearn continues by explaining that "the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out".[37]

• Mark Twain bibliography
• List of films featuring slavery
• The Story of a Bad Boy

• Beaver, Harold, et al., eds. "The Role of Structure in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn." Huckleberry Finn. Vol. 1. No. 8. (New York: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1987) pp. 1–57.
• Brown, Clarence A. "Huckleberry Finn: A Study in Structure and Point of View." Mark Twain Journal 12.2 (1964): 10-15. Online
• Buchen, Callista. "Writing the Imperial Question at Home: Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians Revisited." Mark Twain Annual 9 (2011): 111-129. online
• Gribben, Alan. "Tom Sawyer, Tom Canty, and Huckleberry Finn: The Boy Book and Mark Twain." Mark Twain Journal 55.1/2 (2017): 127-144 online
• Levy, Andrew, Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.
• Quirk, Tom. "The Flawed Greatness of Huckleberry Finn." American Literary Realism 45.1 (2012): 38-48.
• Saunders, George. "The United States of Huck: Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Modern Library Classics, 2001) ISBN 978-0375757372, reprinted in Saunders, George, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007) ISBN 978-1-59448-256-4
• Smiley, Jane (January 1996). "Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second thoughts on Mark Twain's "masterpiece"" (PDF). Harper's Magazine. 292 (1748): 61–.
• Tibbetts, John C., And James M, Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film (2005) pp 1–3.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at Standard Ebooks
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at Project Gutenberg
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with all the original illustrations – Free Online – Mark Twain Project (printed 2003 University of California Press, online 2009 MTPO) Rich editorial material accompanies text, including detailed historical notes, glossaries, maps, and documentary appendixes, which record the author's revisions as well as unauthorized textual variations.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Digitized copy of the first American edition from Internet Archive (1885).
• "Special Collections: Mark Twain Room (Houses original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn)". Libraries of Buffalo & Erie County. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved September 21, 2007.