The American Classic: A Review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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A short Notice sits ahead of Chapter I, and it reads like a threat. “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted”, it begins, then promises banishment for anyone who goes looking for a moral and a bullet for anyone who goes looking for a plot. The signature, per the Project Gutenberg edition, is “G. G., Chief of Ordnance.”

Readers have ignored the warning for well over a century. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been taken as a boy’s river adventure, an attack on slavery, a study of a conscience at war with itself, a novel that loses its nerve in the last quarter, and a book some schools would rather not assign. Each reading can be defended from the page, which is a large part of why the book is still argued over.

Mark Twain and the Making of the Book

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, who lived from 1835 to 1910. By the account on Wikipedia, he wrote the manuscript in pen between 1876 and 1883, set it aside for years in the middle, and came back to it after a trip down the Hudson River. He had first imagined a sequel that followed Huck into adulthood. He dropped that plan.

The book reached readers in two stages. It was published in the United Kingdom and Canada on December 10, 1884, by Chatto & Windus, and in the United States on February 18, 1885, by Charles L. Webster and Company. The illustrator was E. W. Kemble, then a young artist at Life magazine, whom Twain chose himself; a rare-book dealer’s description of a first edition counts 174 of his drawings. Thirty thousand copies had already been printed when someone noticed that an engraver had made a last-minute addition to Kemble’s picture of Silas Phelps, and a new plate had to be cut to correct the copies on hand. According to the same Wikipedia entry, the first half of the manuscript was reportedly misplaced by the printer and did not turn up until 1991.

The voice is the achievement. A note at the front announces that several dialects are used, and the narration itself is Huck talking, with the grammar of a boy raised on the Missouri riverbank. Even the opening line shrugs off the earlier book: Huck says that not knowing Tom Sawyer “ain’t no matter.”

What Happens on the River

Huck begins the novel with money left over from Tom Sawyer and two guardians, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. His father, Pap, an abusive drunk, turns up to claim the fortune and locks him in a remote cabin. Huck stages his own death and escapes to Jackson’s Island, where he finds Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, who has run off after learning he was about to be sold.

The two take a raft down the Mississippi toward Cairo, Illinois, and the free states beyond. Along the way they find a floating house with a dead man inside, Pap, a fact Jim keeps from Huck. Two con men, the King and the Duke, climb aboard and drag the raft into one swindle after another, from a short, overpriced stage show to an attempt to steal the estate of Peter Wilks from his nieces. The King then sells Jim to the Phelps family. Huck resolves to free him, and Tom Sawyer arrives under a false name with an elaborate rescue scheme that wounds Tom and gets Jim recaptured. The resolution is almost an insult: Aunt Polly reveals that Miss Watson freed Jim in her will, and Tom admits he knew all along. Huck decides to head for Indian Territory.

A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience

Twain described the book as one where, in his words, “a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.” The sentence is the best short guide to the novel’s central scene. Huck has been taught that slavery is lawful, that helping a slave escape is theft, and that theft sends a person to hell. He writes a letter turning Jim in, then cannot send it.

Raft with a lean-to shelter drifting down a misty river at dawn

“All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

(Huck, Chapter XXXI. Source: SparkNotes, Huckleberry Finn quotes.)

The irony is Twain’s whole method. Huck believes he is choosing wickedness, and the reader watches him choose the one decent thing available. No character delivers a sermon. The moral the Notice said would be punished is carried out by a boy who does not recognize it as one.

The River, the Raft and the Shore

The structure sets two worlds against each other. On the raft, Huck and Jim eat, talk and drift, and the pace slows to something close to freedom. On shore, the book turns up fraud, family violence and ordinary cruelty, usually in the hands of people with respectable manners. The King and the Duke are the book’s comic engine, but what they get away with says as much about the towns that believe them as about the men themselves.

The Wikipedia summary of the novel’s themes lists race and identity, freedom versus civilization, and social responsibility in a changing America. Blogger David Guy, writing in a 2024 post, reads the raft as an idyll, with the boy’s adventure serving as cover for Twain’s criticism of slavery. That reading holds up. It also leaves a harder question open, which is how fully Jim is allowed to be a person. Scholars cited on Wikipedia read Jim as both humanizing and stereotyped, and the book gives each side something to point to.

The Ending Problem

Ernest Hemingway praised the book in terms few novels get, and then told readers where to stop. In Green Hills of Africa (1935) he traced modern American writing back to this one novel, but advised ending the book before the rescue plot, because after that, as Wikipedia quotes him, “the rest is just cheating.”

Mississippi river town at dusk with a steamboat at the landing

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain…”

(Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 1935. Source: Bauman Rare Books listing.)

The objection has a point. The Phelps farm chapters hand the book over to Tom Sawyer, who treats a man’s freedom as the raw material for a game. Guy calls the ending contrived and says it falls flat. Others have argued the opposite. Ralph Ellison, among Hemingway’s critics, held that the rescue section is structurally and morally necessary, and Ron Powers called the novel a “consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters.” Read as satire, Tom’s fussy plan is a pointed picture of how the educated and comfortable treat other people’s lives. Read as plot, it drags. A fair reader can hold both views at once.

Why the Book Keeps Getting Challenged

The complaints began almost at once. In 1885 the Concord, Massachusetts, public library committee excluded the book, and the Boston Transcript reported that one member called it “the veriest trash.” Louisa May Alcott criticized it, and the Brooklyn Public Library banned it in 1905. The grounds have shifted over time. Early critics objected to Huck’s coarseness and lack of reverence; the modern objection concerns the novel’s frequent use of a racial slur.

The record since then is long. In 1955 CBS broadcast a version that deleted every mention of slavery and left Jim out entirely. The American Library Association ranked the novel fifth among the most challenged books of the 1990s. A 2011 edition from NewSouth Books replaced the slur with “slave,” a change scholar Alan Gribben supported for classroom use and Thomas Wortham criticized. In December 2016, the Associated Press reported that Accomack County Public Schools in Virginia had temporarily suspended the book after a parent complaint, pending a committee review. In March 2019, CBS Philadelphia reported that two New Jersey Assembly members had introduced a resolution arguing the novel should no longer be taught; the coverage reported no vote.

Defenders answer that the language belongs to its setting and to Huck’s voice. David Guy puts it this way: “Twain was a man of his time, using the language of his time.” Guy argues that readers who skip the book over the word lose a great novel. Those who disagree argue that a teenager in a mixed classroom should not have to absorb it unassisted. Both positions come from people who take the book seriously.

On Screen and Stage

The novel has been filmed repeatedly. Wikipedia lists a 1939 version with Mickey Rooney, a 1960 version with Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore, and a 1993 version, The Adventures of Huck Finn, with Elijah Wood, plus a 1955 television film with Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine and a four-part PBS adaptation in 1985. The 1985 Broadway musical Big River put the story to music by Roger Miller. For a quick orientation before opening the book, the official Video SparkNotes channel offers a short summary:

Frequently Asked Questions

When was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published?
The first edition appeared in the United Kingdom and Canada on December 10, 1884. The United States edition followed on February 18, 1885.

Writer's desk beside a window above a wide river with manuscript pages

Do you need to read Tom Sawyer first?
No. Huck’s opening lines acknowledge the earlier book and the money he got from it, but the plot of this novel is self-contained.

Why do critics dislike the ending?
The last section hands the story to Tom Sawyer, whose elaborate rescue scheme turns Jim’s captivity into a game. Hemingway told readers to stop before it. Ralph Ellison and others have defended it as essential.

Why has the book been banned or challenged?
Early objections, starting in 1885, centered on Huck’s rough language and manners. Modern challenges focus on the novel’s repeated use of a racial slur and on how Jim is portrayed.

Is it free to read online?
Yes. The book is in the public domain, and a free edition is available as Project Gutenberg ebook #76.

Where to Read It

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics) (affiliate link) is the paperback this link points to, listed by a bookseller with an introduction by R. Kent Rasmussen and a foreword by Azar Nafisi.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A commission may be earned if you buy through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Further Reading

David Guy’s post The River is Freedom, the Raft Paradise, on his blog Dave’s Place, takes a clear position on the language question and the weak ending, and is worth reading beside the arguments above.

Other classic reviews on this site: Animal Farm: A Political Allegory of Totalitarianism and The Power of Knowledge: A Review of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Sources

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