Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn picks up where Tom Sawyer left off: Huck, newly rich from the gold he and Tom found, is being "sivilized" by the Widow Douglas and the strict Miss Watson. Chafing under respectable life and menaced by his violent, drunken father, Huck fakes his own death and flees down the Mississippi River on a raft. He falls in with Jim, Miss Watson's slave who has run away to avoid being sold. Together they drift south, encountering con men, feuding families, mobs, and frauds, while Huck wrestles with whether to betray Jim or help him reach freedom.
Told in Huck's own vernacular voice, the novel is a landmark of American literature for its biting satire of slavery, hypocrisy, and so-called civilized society. Through Huck's hard-won loyalty to Jim, Twain dramatizes a boy's moral awakening against the conscience of a corrupt age, making the book both a rollicking adventure and a profound meditation on freedom and human dignity.
How it begins
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR P ER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE. EXPLANATORY In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. THE AUTHOR. HUCKLEBERRY FINN Scene: The Mississippi Valley Time: Forty to fifty years ago CHAPTER I. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.