Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Front cover of the 1884 first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a children's novel of forty-three chapters by the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote professionally under the pseudonym of Mark Twain. It was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. It is a sequel to Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The action takes place some forty years before the novel was published in the pre-Civil War American South. The story begins in the fictional village of St. Petersburg in Missouri at the point at which The Adventures of Tom Sawyer finishes. The homeless boy Huckleberry Finn, the novel's title character and protagonist, and his adventurous friend Tom Sawyer have recently become rich after finding twelve thousand dollars in gold coins in an abandoned house. A wealthy woman known as the Widow Douglas, whose life Huckleberry Finn saves in the previous book, decides to look after and educate the outcast boy. Huckleberry Finn goes to live in the Widow Douglas' house, which is also home to her elderly sister Miss Watson who has a slave named Jim. The boy dislikes the attempts of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson to "civilize" him. Huckleberry Finn's long absent and alcoholic father finds out about his son's sudden wealth. He returns to St. Petersburg to claim the money for himself. He takes Huckleberry Finn away from the Widow Douglas' house to live in a cabin in the woods. In order to escape from his abusive father, as well as from the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, Huckleberry Finn fakes his own murder and hides out on an island in the Mississippi River. He discovers that Miss Watson's slave Jim has run away and is also hiding out on the island. After sneaking back to St. Petersburg one evening, Huckleberry Finn finds out Jim is suspected of being his murderer and that men are looking for him. The boy and the runaway slave leave the island on a raft and sail down the Mississippi, traveling by night and hiding by day. Due to thick fog, they miss the town from which Jim could easily escape to freedom in the North and continue to aimlessly sail south. They are joined by two con men, who claim to be the rightful heir to an English dukedom and the rightful king of France. Although Huckleberry soon realizes they are lying, he continues to call the two men the duke and the king. Huckleberry Finn tells the two men that Jim is his slave but they travel by night to avoid trouble with people who might mistake Jim for a runaway. So that they can travel by day, the duke decides to say that they are poor people who have captured an escaped slave. He has a handbill printed which states that Jim is a runaway slave from a non-existent plantation in New Orleans and that there is a $200 reward for his return. They make stops at various towns along the river where the duke and the king try to trick the local people into parting with their money. After the duke and the king fail to keep hold of much money from their various scams, the king shows two men the proof that Jim is a runaway slave with a $200 reward on his head and gives him to them in exchange for $40. Huckleberry Finn finds out that Jim has been taken to the home of the wealthy Silas Phelps. He is being kept locked up there until he can be returned to New Orleans. Huckleberry Finn makes his way to the Phelps' house. Silas Phelps' wife Sally is expecting her nephew to arrive. She immediately mistakes Huckleberry Finn for that nephew, who turns out to be Huckleberry's good friend Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry continues to impersonate his friend. When the real Tom Sawyer arrives, he pretends to be his brother Sid. When he finds out that Huckleberry Finn wants to help Jim get away to freedom, Tom Sawyer is excited by the idea of helping a prisoner to escape. Tom, however, insists that the escape has to be done properly according to the way such escapes are always done in adventure novels. Tom comes up with an elaborate escape plan. It involves making the cabin where Jim is being kept more like the cells Tom has read about in books and making Jim behave more like prisoners always do in those books. Both Huckleberry Finn and Jim assume Tom knows best and go along with the plan.

Huckleberry Finn. 1885 illustration by the American artist Edward Winsor Kemble.

Unlike The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is narrated in the first person by Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn speaks in a non-standard dialect of English that includes many structures that would be considered ungrammatical in standard English. His speech, along with the speech of all the other characters in the book, is written phonetically, meaning that there are many unusual spellings in the novel. According to an introductory note by Twain, several different dialects are used in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, including, "the Missouri negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect, the ordinary 'Pike County' dialect, and four modified varieties of the last". The only major character who usually speaks in standard American English is the con man known as the duke. The non-standard grammar, curious spellings and use of outdated slang are likely to make the novel difficult for some readers to understand. Non-native speakers of English are likely to require an annotated edition of the novel, preferably one annotated in their first language, in order to read it in the original. Many readers may find that reading the novel along to a good audiobook recording helps them to understand and enjoy it better.

When it was first published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was heavily criticized for its use of coarse language. More recently, the repeated use of racially offensive language in the novel has proved problematic. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been criticized for being overly reliant on racial stereotypes, although Twain's intentions in writing it were anti-racist. The novel highlights some of the contradictions in the United States., a country which lauds freedom, but where slavery was permitted long after it had been banned in other places, where "all men are created equal", but racism is rampant. The language, violence and examples of hypocrisy have gotten the book banned in many places. According to Banned in the U.S.A by Herbert N. Foerstel as quoted on About.com it is the fourth most commonly banned book (in the U.S.).

Advenyures of Huckleberry Finn has been adapted to other media multiple times. There are at least twenty different screen adaptations of the novel.

Adaptations

Lobby card for the 1939 American film The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn starring Mickey Rooney.

Films based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn include Huck and Tom (USA 1918), Huckleberry Finn (USA 1920), Huckleberry Finn (USA 1931), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (USA 1939), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (USA 1960), Hopelessly Lost (Russian: Совсем пропащий; Sovsem propashchiy, USSR 1973), Huckleberry Finn (USA 1974), The Adventures of Huck Finn (USA 1993), Tom and Huck (USA 1995), The Adventures of Huck Finn (German: Die Abenteuer des Huck Finn, Germany 2012), Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (USA 2014) and Band of Robbers (USA 2015).

The American TV movie Huckleberry Finn, starring Ron Howard as the title character, was first shown on ABC on March 25, 1975. It won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Special.

The two-part American TV movie The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn, in which Twain's two famous characters are reimagined as girls, was made for the ABC Weekend Special series. It originally aired on ABC on February 23 and March 2, 1985. It stars Brandy Ward as "Huckle" Mary Finn and Drew Barrymore as Constance "Con" Sawyer.

Issue #19 of Classic Comics, first published in the United states in April 1944, includes an adaptation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The 26-episode TV series Huckleberry Finn and his Friends, based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was co-produced by production companies from Canada and West Germany. The first episode originally aired on Canadian television on January 1, 1980. It stars the Canadian child actors Ian Tracey as Huckleberry Finn, who is also the series' narrator, and Sam Snyders as Tom Sawyer.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has twice been adapted as a Japanese anime series. The 26-episode series Huckleberry no Bōken (ハックルベリィの冒険) first aired on Fuji TV in 1978. The 26-episode series Huckleberry Finn Monogatari (ハックルベリー・フィン物語) was made for NHK in 1994.

The musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with book by William Hauptman and music and lyrics by Roger Miller, was first performed at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts in February 1984. It opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theater on April 25, 1983 and ran for 1,005 performances, closing on September 20, 1987. A Broadway revival opened at the American Airlines Theater on July 24, 2003 where it ran for sixty-seven performances and twenty-eight previews.

External links

• Quotations from ASdventures of Huckleberry Finn on Wikiquote.
• About.com's article: Censorship and Book Banning in America: Taking Stock by Melissa Kelly

Study guides

• SparkNotes on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on GrAdeSave.com

Electronic copies

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain on Wikisource
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is posted on the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain on Literature.org, or "The Online Literature Library"
• American Literature .com has Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Free public domain audiobook of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from LibriVox.