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Huckleberry Finn has been taken in by the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, who intend to "sivilize" him. But when Huck's violent drunk of a father kidnaps him, Huck fakes his own death to escape. Teaming up with Jim, an escaped slave with a price on his head, the two fugitives go on the run, traveling down the Mississippi River on a raft. But Huck finds himself facing a terrible decision. Should he help Jim escape to the free states or turn his friend in? By allowing Huck to tell his own story, Mark Twain addresses America's painful contradictions of racism and segregation in a "free" and "equal" society. The book has always sparked controversy, but most scholars continue to praise it as a modern masterpiece, one of the greatest novels in all of American literature.
About the author
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel". Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so.
