with that economy and restraint, with just the right details and no more, and leaving to the reader to make his own moral reflections, unless he had been writing in the person of Huck. He sees the real world and he does not judge it– he allows it to judge itself. Huck has not imagination, in the sense in which Tom has it: he has, instead, vision. In his introduction to a 1950 edition of Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s fellow-Missourian T.S. And without Huck’s distinctive voice and perspective, Twain could not have written the book that he did. The novel was Twain’s first attempt at writing an entire book in dialect, and he took pains to get his characters’ voices right. In Huckleberry Finn Huck takes over as first-person narrator of his own story. Huckleberry Finn’s first appearance in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finn is a secondary character, a “romantic outcast” who lives on the fringes of civilized society. Huckleberry Finn takes on one aspect of Twain’s pre-Civil War childhood that Tom Sawyer did not: slavery. When the novel was finally finished, it was a very different book than the Tom Sawyer sequel that Twain had begun. Twain did indeed pigeon-hole his manuscript for several years, and he did not complete it until 1883. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, & may possibly or burn the MS when it is done. I have written 400 pages on it-therefore it is very nearly half done. …another boys’ book-more to be at work than anything else. In August 1876 Twain wrote to William Dean Howells that he had already started writing First edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (American Publishing Company, 1876) Twain’s first novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was published in the spring of 1876 to great popular success. Twain nearly abandoned his project midway through its writing, and its publication was temporarily derailed by a practical joke.

On nearly any list of list of best American Novels you will find Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Frontispiece illustration from the first edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry finn book cover