Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry Finn, the ragged, freedom-loving boy first met in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, fakes his own death to escape his abusive, drunken father and lights out for the Mississippi. On an island he meets Jim, a man enslaved by Miss Watson who has run away to avoid being sold. Together the two set off downriver on a raft, an unlikely pair bound by circumstance and, gradually, by loyalty.

Mark Twain's 1884 masterpiece follows Huck and Jim's episodic journey through the antebellum South, where they encounter feuding families, riverboat swindlers — the self-styled "Duke" and "King" — mobs, and frauds of every kind. As Huck helps Jim toward freedom, he wrestles with a conscience shaped by a society that has taught him that helping an escaped slave is a sin, and slowly reaches his own moral judgment against it.

Written largely in vernacular dialect and narrated in Huck's own unschooled voice, the novel is at once a rollicking adventure and a scathing satire of racism, hypocrisy, and the myths of "civilized" society. Long celebrated as a foundational American novel and just as long debated for its unflinching language, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most influential and argued-over books in the country's literature.