Publisher Description
Here is a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Mark Twain's classic novel of adventure, loyalty and responsibility.
Young Huck Finn can't get along with the Widow Douglas' attempts to sivilize him or the smothering discipline that she and her sister serve up at home. So when his drunken, good-for-nothing father turns up and kidnaps him, Huck takes his cue to leave - and escapes to Jackson's Island.
There he meets runaway slave Jim, and the two become firm friends. Their bond of trust holds strong as they travel down the Mississippi river on a raft - witnessing misdeeds and murder along the way - and are separated, captured, and re-captured before continuing in their bid for freedom.
Full of tension, excitement, comedy and drama, Twain's sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is also regarded as a comment on the slavery and colour prejudice inherent in the mid-19th century American South.
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About Mark Twain
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.