Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885, and it is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain had grown up in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, and had worked as a riverboat pilot before he was a writer, which is why the Mississippi is the book's map and its clock. It was illustrated by E. W. Kemble, and the first edition's appearance in one market before the other is part of its publication history.

The novel is a picaresque, which means it is a series of encounters rather than a plot. Huck and Jim drift from one river town to another and meet fraudsters, feuding families, a lynch mob and a pair of confidence men who take over the raft, and each episode is a small complete story with an argument in it. The book's central subject is the moral education of the narrator, who has been taught one set of rules by the society he comes from and keeps finding that the decent thing to do is the thing he has been told is wrong. Twain handles that through Huck's own reporting, without commentary, which is what makes it work.

It is commonly named among the great American novels and among the first major works of American literature written throughout in vernacular speech. It has also been one of the most contested books in American schools for its language, and the argument about how it should be read and taught has been running for more than half a century. It is a standalone sequel, and it reads best after Tom Sawyer. The closing chapters, in which Tom Sawyer arrives and the plot turns into a practical joke at Jim's expense, are the part critics have argued about most, and Twain himself preferred the river to the rescue.