Young Huckleberry Finn returns to "civilized" life under Widow Douglas's care in St. Petersburg, Missouri. When his violent, alcoholic father reappears demanding money, Huck fakes his death and escapes to Jackson's Island, where he meets Jim, the Widow's runaway slave seeking freedom from being sold down the river.
Together, they journey down the Mississippi River on a raft, encountering con men, thieves, and murderers along the way. As Huck wrestles between societal teachings and his own moral compass regarding helping a runaway slave, Mark Twain masterfully weaves humor and satire into a powerful critique of antebellum Southern society. Through vivid vernacular dialogue and unforgettable characters, this landmark American novel explores friendship, morality, and the nature of freedom in a story that transformed American literature.
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Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.