Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Plot Summary
First released in the United Kingdom in 1884 and the United States in 1885, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is considered among the first great American novels which include such greats as ”Moby Dick”, “Gone with the Wind” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”. It is also notable for being among the first novels to be entirely written in vernacular English, in this case, the dialect of the American Deep South.
Written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens(better known by his pen name, Mark Twain) is a direct sequel to another of Twain’s books “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and features several of the main characters. The Protagonist of the story Huck Finn is a boy in his young teens and (following on from the events of the previous book) during which he and Tom foil the plans of a gang of thieves and are given the money the gang had been storing , making him very wealthy, is living a life of luxury with the Widow Douglas who had agreed to take him in and attempt to civilise him. He hates it. Drawn to a life of adventure he frequently sneaks out to meet up with Tom and his other friends for “adventures” such as terrorizing the local school children.
This all changes when his father, an abusive alcoholic, who had been missing for some time comes to take legal guardianship of the now incredibly wealthy Huck. He succeeds in this and they go to live together away from the town. Huck enjoys aspects of this lifestyle including the hunting, fishing and the all-around simpler life compared to the aristocracy of the widows home but he still longs for adventure. After having enough of his father’s bullying behaviour he decides to fake his own death and head off down the Mississippi.
He soon meets Jim, the black slave that belonged to the widow Douglas, who has runaway under fear of being sold away from his family. Jim will go on to become his friend , father figure and near constant companion throughout the novel. Their adventures range from...