On February 18th 1885, Mark Twain published his famous and controversial novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens) first introduced Huck Finn as the best friend of Tom Sawyer, hero of his tremendously successful novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Though Twain saw Huck’s story as a kind of sequel to his earlier book, the new novel was far more serious, focusing on the institution of slavery and other aspects of life in the antebellum South.
At the book’s heart is the journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on a raft. Jim runs away because he is about to be sold and separated from his wife and children, and Huck goes with him to help him get to Ohio and freedom. Huck narrates the story in his distinctive voice, offering colourful descriptions of the people and places they encounter along the way.
The most striking part of the book is its satirical look at racism, religion and other social attitudes of the time. While Jim is strong, brave, generous and wise, many of the white characters are portrayed as violent, stupid or simply selfish, and the naive Huck ends up questioning the hypocritical, unjust nature of society in general.
Even in 1885, two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn landed with a splash. A month after its publication, a Concord, Massachusetts, library banned the book, calling its subject matter “tawdry” and its narrative voice “coarse” and “ignorant.” Other libraries followed suit, beginning a controversy that continued long after Twain’s death in 1910. In the 1950s, the book came under fire from African-American groups for being racist in its portrayal of black characters, despite the fact that it was seen by many as a strong criticism of racism and slavery. As recently as 1998, an Arizona parent sued her school district, claiming that making Twain’s novel required high school reading made already existing racial tensions even worse.
Aside from its controversial nature and its continuing popularity with young readers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been hailed by many serious literary critics as a masterpiece. No less a judge than Ernest Hemingway famously declared that the book marked the beginning of American literature: “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
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Craig Hill 
Unjust society hurts so many. Twain was brave to write about it.
Yes. He put into words what many other secretly thought.
And the book continues to be “modified” (censored) by groups across the USA. They don’t want the original words of Twain to be used, even though his words tell the story of that period in our history.
I was at least lucky enough to have read it 40 years ago, before many people started “modifying” it.
Another one of his great works, “The Prince and the Pauper” would fit right into today’s arguments about the “rich” and the ‘Poor.” Yes, it’s horrible that they want to censore the words in it. Shows you just how far they have succeeded in dumbing down everyone.
In “Life on the Mississippi” Mark describes in a few paragraphs, a sunset from the view of a boat captain, that has to be the most incredible “descriptive” masterpiece ever written in literature. That man could write.
If you’ve never seen Mark’s house in Hartford, it’s worth visiting.
A few months ago, mt school was involved in an English Language Acting Competition in China (which we won). The second place winner was Prince and the Pauper, which appears to also be well known in China, where a huge number of English novels are not encouraged. It seems that Mark Twain is at least “acceptable” to the Chinese censors…