Book Bearings
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- 346 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 1884
- 2,623 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
Huckleberry Finn, a boy from a small town on the Mississippi in the 1840s, narrates his own story. To get away from his violent, drunken father he fakes his own death and hides on an island in the river, where he finds Jim, a slave who has run away. The two set off downriver on a raft, traveling by night, and meet feuding families, a pair of swindlers who call themselves a duke and a king, and one small town after another. All the while Huck argues with himself about helping Jim, which everything he has been taught tells him is wrong. Mark Twain's novel, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was first published in 1884.
- Adventure
- Courtship
- Friendship
- Humor
- Male friendship
- Race relations
- Satire
- Voyages and travels
2 What to expect
A boy and a runaway slave travel down the Mississippi on a raft in the 1840s, in a novel told in the boy's own dialect. It is an adventure, a comedy and a satire of the slaveholding South, centered on his struggle between what he has been taught and what he feels is right. The story is episodic and often very funny, the dialects take some getting used to, and it uses a racial slur throughout, as its setting did.
Good for readers who want: an American classic, a river adventure, and satire with a moral center.
3 Read it free, right here
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Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Mark Twain
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 More by Mark Twain
6 Similar books
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- Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie