Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.
Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics since its publication. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger", despite strong arguments that the protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is anti-racist.[2] [3]
In order of appearance:
- Huckleberry Finn, a boy about thirteen or fourteen. He has been brought up by his father, the town drunk, and has a hard time fitting into society.
- Widow Douglas is the kind old lady who has taken him in after he and Tom come across the money. She tries her best to civilize Huck, believing it is her Christian duty.
- The widow’s sister, a tough old spinster called Miss Watson, also lives with them. She is pretty hard on Huck, causing him to resent her a good deal. Samuel Clemens may have drawn inspiration for her from several people he knew in his life. [4]
- Jim, the widow's big, mild-mannered slave to whom Huck becomes very close in the novel.
- Huck’s friend, Tom Sawyer, the main character of other Twain novels and the leader of the town boys in adventures, is “the best fighter and the smartest kid in town” [4]
- Huck’s father, "Pap" Finn, is the town drunk. He is often angry at Huck and resents him getting any kind of education.
- Mrs. Judith Loftus seemingly plays a small part in the novel - being the kind and perceptive woman whom Huck talks to in order to find out about the search for Jim- but many critics believe her to be the best female character in the novel.[4]
- The Grangerfords, the prominent family of Col. Grangerford, takes Huck in until most of them are killed in a feudal skirmish with another family.
- After the Grangerfords, Huck and Jim take aboard two con artists who call themselves the Duke and the King.
- Joanna, Mary Jane and Susan are the three young women whose wealthy uncle and caretaker recently died.
- When Huck goes after Jim, he meets Tom's Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps. She is a loving but high strung lady, and he a plodding old man.
Later on Post-novel Huck meets Steven Tyler who is an air force pilot. Many other characters play important but minimal roles in the many episodes that make up the novel. They include slaves owned by the various families they meet, supporting townspeople, rafts-men, a doctor and a steamboat captain
Huckleberry Finn, as depicted by
E. W. Kemble in the original 1884 edition of the book
The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shore of the Mississippi River, sometime between 1835 (when the first steamboat sailed down the Mississippi)[5] and 1845. Two young boys, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck has been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson, is attempting to civilize him. Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds civilized life confining. His spirits are raised somewhat when Tom Sawyer helps him to escape one night past Miss Watson's slave Jim, to meet up with his gang of self-proclaimed "robbers". However, when the gang's exploits turn out to be nothing worse than disrupting Sunday School outings and stealing paltry items like hymn books (which the Sunday School teacher forces them to return anyway), Huck is again downcast. However, his life is changed by the sudden reappearance of his shiftless father "Pap", an abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing him from acquiring his fortune (he gives all 6,000 dollars to Judge Thatcher), Pap forcibly gains custody of him and moves him to his backwoods cabin. Though Huck prefers this to his life with the widow, he resents his father's drunken violence and his habit of keeping him locked inside the cabin. During one of his father's absences Huck escapes, elaborately fakes his own murder and sets off down the Mississippi River.
While living quite comfortably in the wilderness along the Mississippi, Huck encounters Miss Watson's slave Jim on an island called Jackson's Island. Huck learns that Jim has also run away after he overheard Miss Watson's plan to sell Jim downriver, where conditions for slaves were even harsher, because he would bring a price of $800.
Jim is trying to make his way to Cairo, Illinois and then to Ohio, a free state, so he can buy his family's freedom. At first, Huck is conflicted over whether to tell someone about Jim's running away, but as they travel together and talk in depth, Huck begins to know more about Jim's past and his difficult life. As these conversations continue, Huck begins to change his opinion about people, slavery, and life in general. This continues throughout the rest of the novel.
Huck and Jim take up in a cavern on a hill on Jackson's Island to wait out a storm. When they can, they scrounge around the river looking for food, wood, and other items. One night, they find a raft they will eventually use to travel down the Mississippi. Later, they find an entire house floating down the river and enter it to grab what they can. Entering one room, Jim finds a man lying dead on the floor, shot in the back while apparently trying to ransack the house. Jim refuses to let Huck see the man's face.
To find out the latest news in the area, Huck dresses as a girl and goes into town. He enters the house of a woman new to the area, thinking she will not recognize him. Huck learns from her that that opinion is divided about the "murder": while some believe Pap has killed his son in order to inherit his fortune, others blame the runaway Jim. Either way there is a $300 reward for Jim's capture, and a manhunt is already underway. The woman becomes suspicious when Huck threads a needle incorrectly, and her suspicions are confirmed after she puts Huck through a series of tests. Having tricked him into revealing he is a boy, she nevertheless allows him to leave her home, believing him to be a mistreated apprentice on the run. Huck returns quickly to the island where he tells Jim of the impending danger. The two immediately load up the raft and leave the island.
Huck and Jim's raft is swamped by a passing steamship, separating the two. Huck is given shelter by the Grangerfords, a prosperous local family. He becomes friends with Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons go to church. Both families bring guns to continue the show, despite the church's preachings on brotherly love.
The vendetta comes to a head when Buck's sister, Sophia Grangerford, elopes with Harney Shepherdson. In the resulting conflict, all the Grangerford males from this branch of the family are shot and killed, although Grangerfords elsewhere survive to carry on the feud. Upon seeing Buck's corpse, Huck is too devastated to write about everything that happened. However, Huck does describe how he narrowly avoids his own death in the gunfight, later reuniting with Jim and the raft and together fleeing farther south on the Mississippi River.
Further down the river, Jim and Huck rescue two cunning grifters, who join Huck and Jim on the raft. The younger of the two swindlers, a man of about thirty, introduces himself as a son of an English duke (the Duke of Bridgewater) and his father's rightful successor. The older one, about seventy, then trumps the Duke's claim by alleging that he is the Lost Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. He continually mispronounces the duke's title as "Bilgewater" in conversation.
The Duke and the King then join Jim and Huck on the raft, committing a series of confidence schemes on the way south. To allow for Jim's presence, they print fake bills for an escaped slave; and later they paint him up entirely in blue and call him the "Sick Arab". On one occasion they arrive in a town and advertise a three-night engagement of a play which they call "The Royal Nonesuch". The play turns out to be only a couple of minutes of hysterical cavorting, not worth anywhere near the 50 cents the townsmen were charged to see it.
On the afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs arrives in town and makes a nuisance of himself by going around threatening a southern gentleman by the name of Colonel Sherburn. Sherburn comes out and warns Boggs that he can continue threatening him up until exactly one o'clock. At one o'clock, Boggs continues and Colonel Sherburn kills him. Somebody in the crowd, whom Sherburn later identifies as Buck Harkness, cries out that Sherburn should be lynched. They all head up to Colonel Sherburn's gate, where they are met by Sherburn, who is standing on his porch carrying a loaded shotgun and his three legged dalmatian. He causes them to back down, by making a defiant speech telling them about the essential cowardice of "Southern justice". The only lynching to be done here, says Sherburn, will be in the dark, by men wearing masks.
By the third night of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople are ready to take their revenge; but the Duke and the King have already skipped town, and together with Huck and Jim, they continue down the river. Once they are far enough away, the two grifters test the next town, and decide to impersonate two brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. Using an absurd English accent, the King manages to convince nearly all the townspeople that he is one of the brothers, a preacher just arrived from England, while the Duke pretends to be a deaf-mute to match accounts of the other brother. One man in town is certain that they are a fraud and confronts them on the matter, but the crowd refuses to support him. Afterwards, the Duke, out of fear, suggests to the King that they should cut and run. The King boldly states his intention to continue to liquidate Wilks' estate, saying, "Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"
Huck likes Wilks' daughters, who treat him with kindness and courtesy, so he tries to thwart the grifters' plans by stealing back the inheritance money. When he is in danger of being discovered, he has to hide it in Wilks' coffin, which is buried the next morning without Huck knowing whether the money has been found or not. The arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into confusion when none of their signatures match the one on record. (The deaf-mute brother, who is said to do the correspondence, has his arm in a sling and cannot currently write.) The townspeople devise a test, which requires digging up the coffin to check. When the money is found in Wilks' coffin, the Duke and the King are able to escape in the confusion. They manage to rejoin Huck and Jim on the raft to Huck's despair, since he had thought he had escaped them.
After the four fugitives have drifted far enough from the town, the King takes advantage of Huck's temporary absence to sell his interest in the "escaped" slave Jim for forty dollars. Outraged by this betrayal, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience", which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson's property. Accepting that "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.
Jim is being held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps, Tom's aunt and uncle. Since Tom is expected for a visit, Huck is mistaken for Tom. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and free him. When Huck intercepts Tom on the road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his younger half-brother Sid. Jim has also told the household about the two grifters and the new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", so this time the townspeople are ready for them. The Duke and King are captured by the townspeople, and are tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.
Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, hidden tunnels, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from popular novels,[6] including a note to the Phelps warning them of a gang planning to steal their runaway slave. During the resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg. Jim remains with him rather than completing his escape, risking recapture. Huck has long known Jim was "white on the inside". Although the doctor admires Jim's decency, he betrays him to a passing skiff, and Jim is captured while sleeping and returned to the Phelps family.
After Jim's recapture, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck and Tom's true identities. Tom announces that Jim is a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom chose not to reveal Jim's freedom so he could come up with an elaborate plan to rescue Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father has been dead for some time (he was the dead man they found in the floating house) and that Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. In the final narrative, Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and "sivilize" him, Huck intends to flee west to Indian Territory.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores notions of race and identity. An obvious complexity exists concerning Jim’s character. While some scholars suggest that Jim was a good-hearted, moral character, others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and Jim's Sambo-like character.[7][8]
Huck struggles not only with the challenges of his strenuous journey, but also with his 1880’s social climate that would have him question Jim’s character. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience", and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".[9]
To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave him, isolate him, and beat him. When Huck escapes – which anyone would agree was the right thing to do – he then immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing.[10]
Some scholars discuss Huck’s own character, and the novel as a whole, in context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin who writes in her 1990’s book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, "by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery," white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core."[11] It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and black culture in the United States.
The original illustrations were done by Edward W. Kemble (more often known as E.W. Kemble), at the time a young artist working for Life magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that,
- “Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace (and some of his pictures are badly drawn), Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain in a few sentances could suggest a fully rounded character, so too could Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same whole personage.”[12]
As Kemble could only afford one model, most of his illustrations he produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble also produced another set of illustrations for Harper’s and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright.[13]
Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson river, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade).[14]
As it relates to the actual body of text during the time of publication, Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of Huck Finn three times. He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "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."[15] The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting.[16][17]
A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.[18]
Demand for the book would spread outside of the United States.Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and England, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States.[19] The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble’s picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps’ groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies.[20][21]
In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library's curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been lost by the printer. In 1991, the missing half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck. The library successfully proved possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure.[22]
In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book’s publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain’s already established reputation as a “professional humorist,” having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the “dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation,” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn illustrated “previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century.”[23]
In this scene illustrated by
E. W. Kemble, Jim thinks Huck is a ghost
While it was clear that the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer of The New York Times concluded in 1984 that Twain’s novel was not initially “too unpleasantly regarded.” In fact, Mailer writes that “the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later,” reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.[24]
Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book’s challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain’s time, and today, defenders of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and ‘censors’ thus equating the complaints about the book's ‘coarseness’ from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights.”[25]
Upon issue of the American edition in 1885 several libraries banned it from their stacks.[26] The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper, the Boston Transcript:
The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.[27]
Twain later remarked to his editor, "Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as 'trash and only suitable for the slums.' This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!"
In 1905, New York’s Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to bad word choice and Huck having “not only itched but scratched” within the novel, which was considered obscene. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain replied:
I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.[28]
Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained.[29] Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn, and hailed it as "the best book we've had". He cautioned, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."[30][31] (The words "nigger" and "Jim" appear side-by-side once in the novel, in Chapter XXXI, in a letter Huck writes to Mrs. Watson, but they are not used as a name. After "nigger Jim" appears in Albert Bigelow Paine's 1912 Clemens biography, it continued to be used by twentieth century critics, including Leslie Fiedler, Norman Mailer, and Russell Baker.) Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book’s publication as well, saying that if Twain "[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them".[32][33] Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography (Mark Twain: A Life) that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters", in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim.[34]
The language of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made for its controversial condition during its first year on the shelves and into the modern world of literature. In his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain “could be uninhibitedly vulgar,” and quotes William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author’s “humor was not for most women.” However, Hearn continues by explaining that “the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out.”[35]
Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism.[36] Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim.[26] According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and therefore resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes.[37]
In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely.[38]
Because of this controversy over whether Huckleberry Finn is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel, many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school system—this questioning of the word “nigger” is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism I’ve ever seen in my life".[39] According to the American Library Association, Huckleberry Finn was the fifth most-frequently-challenged book in the United States during the 1990s.[40]
There have been several more recent cases involving protests for the banning of the novel. In 2003 high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother, Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, proposed banning the book from classroom learning in the Renton School District, though not from any public libraries, because of the word "nigger". Clark filed a request with the school district in response to the required reading of the book, asking for the novel to be removed from the English curriculum. The two curriculum committees that considered her request eventually decided to keep the novel on the 11th grade curriculum, though they suspended it until a panel had time to review the novel and set a specific teaching procedure for the novel and its controversial topics.[41]
In 2009 a Washington state high school teacher called for the removal of the novel from a school curriculum. The teacher, John Foley, called for replacing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a more modern novel.[42] In an opinion column that Foley wrote in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, he states that all "novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go". He states that teaching the novel is not only unnecessary, but difficult due to the offensive language within the novel with many students becoming uncomfortable at "just hear[ing] the N-word". He views this change as “common sense”, with Obama’s election into office as a sign that Americans “are ready for a change”, and that by removing these books from the reading lists, they would be following this change.[43]
Publishers of the book have made their own attempts at easing the controversy by way of less-coarse publications. A 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books, replaced the word "nigger" with "slave" (although being incorrectly addressed to a freed man) and did not use the term "Injun". Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be more friendly for use in classrooms, rather than have the work banned outright from classroom reading lists due to its language.[44]
According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa "At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled."[45] Another scholar, Thomas Wortham, criticized the changes, saying the new edition "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'".[46]
Responses to this include the publishing of The Hipster Huckleberry Finn which is an edition with the word "nigger" replaced with the word "hipster". The book's description includes this statement "Thanks to editor Richard Grayson, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn are now neither offensive nor uncool."[47]
- Tom Sawyer (1917 silent) by Famous Players-Lasky; directed by William Desmond Taylor; starring Jack Pickford as Tom, Robert Gordon as Huck and Clara Horton as Becky
- Huck and Tom (1918 silent) by Famous Players-Lasky; directed by William Desmond Taylor; starring Jack Pickford as Tom, Robert Gordon as Huck and Clara Horton as Becky
- Huckleberry Finn (1920 silent) by Famous Players-Lasky; directed by William Desmond Taylor; starring Lewis Sargent as Huck, Gordon Griffith as Tom and Thelma Salter as Becky[48][49]
- Tom Sawyer (1930) by Paramount Pictures; directed by John Cromwell; starring Jackie Coogan as Tom, Junior Durkin as Huck and Mitzi Green as Becky
- Huckleberry Finn (1931) by Paramount Pictures; directed by Norman Taurog; starring Jackie Coogan as Tom, Junior Durkin as Huck and Mitzi Green as Becky[50][51]
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (February 1938) by Selznick International Pictures; directed by Norman Taurog; starring Tommy Kelly as Tom, Jackie Moran as Huck and Ann Gillis as Becky
- Tom Sawyer, Detective (December 1938) by Paramount Pictures; directed by Louis King; starring Billy Cook as Tom and Donald O'Connor as Huck [Becky Thatcher was absent from this feature]
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) by MGM; directed by Richard Thorpe; starring Mickey Rooney as Huck [Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were absent from this feature]
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1954 film starring Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine produced by CBS[52][53]
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a 1960 film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore
- The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1968 children's television series combining live-action and animation.
- Hopelessly Lost, a 1972 Soviet film
- Huckleberry Finn, a 1974 musical film
- Huckleberry Finn, a 1975 ABC movie of the week with Ron Howard as Huck Finn
- Huckleberry Finn, a 1976 Japanese anime with 26 episodes
- Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, a 1979 television series starring Ian Tracey
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1981)(TV) Kurt Ida as Huckleberry Finn
- Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (1982) (TV) Anthony Michael Hall as Huck Finn
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1985 television movie which was filmed in Maysville, Kentucky.
- The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn, a 1985 ABC movie of the week with Drew Barrymore as Con Sawyer
- The Adventures of Huck Finn, a 1993 film starring Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance
- Huckleberry Finn Monogatari, a 1994 Japanese anime with 26 episodes
- Tom and Huck, a 1995 Disney film starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Brad Renfro, Joey Stinson, and Rachael Leigh Cook
- Tomato Sawyer and Huckleberry Larry's Big River Rescue, a VeggieTales parody of Huckleberry Finn created by Big Idea Productions with Larry the Cucumber as the titular character. (2008)[54][55]
- ^ Facsimile of the 1st US edition.
- ^ Mark Twain, New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885, HathiTrust Digital Library, HathiTrust, accessed April 12, 2012, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t3cz3334b.
- ^ Jacob O'Leary, "Critical Annotation of "Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth Century 'Liberality' in Huckleberry Finn" (Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann)," Wiki Service, University of Iowa, last modified February 11, 2012, accessed April 12, 2012, http://wiki.uiowa.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=38342425.
- ^ a b c Hill, Richard (2002) (in English). Mark Twain Among The Scholars: Reconsidering Contemporary Twain Criticism. SJK Publishing Industries, Inc.. pp. 67-90. ISBN 978-0-87875-527-1. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=150a0acc-8b8f-4f78-80f4-a856a5a22df4%40sessionmgr10&vid=1&hid=10&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLGN1c3R1aWQmY3VzdGlkPXM4NDU1ODYxJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=lkh&AN=43261625.
- ^ U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Team New Orleans. "Steamboat Navigation". Mississippi River Navigation. Retrieved December 18, 2011.
- ^ Victor A. Doyno (1991). Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain's creative process. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 191. ISBN tk. [1]
- ^ 2. Jacob O'Leary, "Critical Annotation of "Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth Century 'Liberality' in Huckleberry Finn" (Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann)," Wiki Service, University of Iowa, last modified February 11, 2012, accessed April 12, 2012, http://wiki.uiowa.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=38342425.
- ^ Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann, "Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth Century "Liberality" in Huckleberry Finn," in Satire or evasion?: Black perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, eds. James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).
- ^ Victor A. Doyno, Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain's Creative Process (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1991).
- ^ Barbara Foley, “Satire Or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn by James S. Leonard; Thomas A.Tenney; Thadious Davis; The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867 by Dana D. Nelson,” Modern Philology 92.3 (1995): 379-85, JSTOR, accessed April 16, 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/438790.
- ^ John Alberti, "The Nigger Huck: Race, Identity, and the Teaching of Huckleberry Finn,” College English 57.8 (1995): 919-37, JSTOR, last modified February 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/378621.
- ^ 5. Mark Twain and Michael Patrick. Hearn, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981) 15.
- ^ Virginia H Cope, "Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: Text, Illustrations, and Early Reviews," Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn, last modified 1995, accessed April 12, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html.
- ^ Mark Twain and Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981).
- ^ Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966), 212.
- ^ William Baker, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain," The Antioch Review, Inc. 54.3 (1996): 364-65, JSTOR, accessed April 16, 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4613362.
- ^ Rita Reif, "First Half of 'Huck Finn,' in Twain's Hand, Is Found," The New York Times, last modified February 17, 1991, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/14/books/first-half-of-huck-finn-in-twain-s-hand-is-found.html.
- ^ William Baker, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain”
- ^ "All Modern Literature Comes from One Book by Mark Twain," Bauman Rare Books, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/twain-mark/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/63515.aspx.
- ^ Walter Blair, Mark Twain & Huck Finn (Berkeley: University of California, 1960).
- ^ "All Modern Literature Comes from One Book by Mark Twain”
- ^ Rita Reif, "ANTIQUES; How 'Huck Finn' Was Rescued," The New York Times, last modified March 17, 1991, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/17/books/antiques-how-huck-finn-was-rescued.html.
- ^ Henry N. Smith, "The Publication of "Huckleberry Finn": A Centennial Retrospect," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 37.5 (1984): 18-40, JSTOR, accessed February 21, 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3823856.
- ^ Norman Mailer, "Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100," The New York Times, last modified December 9, 1984, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/09/books/mailer-huck.html.
- ^ John Alberti, "The Nigger Huck: Race, Identity, and the Teaching of Huckleberry Finn,” College English 57.8 (1995): 919-37, JSTOR, last modified February 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/378621.
- ^ a b Leonard, James S.; Thomas A. Tenney and Thadious M. Davis (December 1992). Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Duke University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-8223-1174-4. http://books.google.com/?id=fdrBtpSSCisC&pg=RA1-PA116&lpg=RA1-PA116&dq=hemingway+%22huckleberry+finn%22+%22green+hills%22.
- ^ Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) 115.
- ^ Marjorie Kehe, "The 'n'-word Gone from Huck Finn – What Would Mark Twain Say? A New Expurgated Edition of 'Huckleberry Finn' Has Got Some Twain Scholars up in Arms," The Christian Science Monitor, last modified January 5, 2011, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2011/0105/The-n-word-gone-from-Huck-Finn-what-would-Mark-Twain-say.
- ^ Nick Gillespie, "Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer: The Bold Deconstruction of a National Icon,” Reason Magazine, last modified February 2006, accessed April 12, 2012, http://reason.com/archives/2006/02/01/mark-twain-vs-tom-sawyer.
- ^ Ernest Hemingway, (Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner, 1935) 22.
- ^ Norman Mailer, "Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100”
- ^ Brown, Robert. "One Hundred Years of Huck Finn". American Heritage Magazine. AmericanHeritage.com. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1984/4/1984_4_81.shtml. Retrieved November 8, 2010. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them."
- ^ Robert B. Brown, "One Hundred Years of Huck Finn," American Heritage, last modified June-July 1984, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.americanheritage.com/content/one-hundred-years-huck-finn.
- ^ Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: FreePress, 2005) 476-77.
- ^ Mark Twain and Michael Patrick Hearn, 8.
- ^ For example, Shelley Fisher Fishin, Lighting out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- ^ Stephen Railton, "Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan' For?," The Virginia Quarterly Review, last modified 1987, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1987/summer/railton-jim-mark/.
- ^ Alex Sharp, "Student Edition of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Is Censored by Editor”
- ^ Robert B. Brown, "One Hundred Years of Huck Finn”
- ^ "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books: 1990-1999," American Library Association, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/1990_1999.
- ^ Gregory Roberts, "'Huck Finn' a Masterpiece -- or an Insult," Seattlepi.com, last modified November 25, 2003, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Huck-Finn-a-masterpiece-or-an-insult-1130707.php.
- ^ "Wash. Teacher Calls for 'Huck Finn' Ban," UPI, last modified January 19, 2009, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/01/19/Wash-teacher-calls-for-Huck-Finn-ban/UPI-39901232395760/.
- ^ John Foley, "Guest Columnist: Time to Update Schools' Reading Lists," Seattlepi.com, last modified January 5, 2009, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.seattlepi.com/local/opinion/article/Guest-Columnist-Time-to-update-schools-reading-1296681.php.
- ^ Mark Memmott, "New Edition Of 'Huckleberry Finn' Will Eliminate Offensive Words," NPR, last modified January 4, 2011, accessed April 16, 2012, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/04/132652272/new-edition-of-huckleberry-finn-will-eliminate-offensive-words?ft=1.
- ^ Suzanne La Rosa, "A Word about the NewSouth Edition of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn," NewSouth, Inc., last modified January 4, 2011, accessed April 16, 2012, http://www.newsouthbooks.com/pages/2011/01/04/a-word-about-the-newsouth-edition-of-mark-twains-tom-sawyer-and-huckleberry-finn/.
- ^ "New Editions of Mark Twain Novels to Remove Racial Slurs," Herald Sun, last modified January 4, 2011, accessed April 16, 2012, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/new-editions-of-mark-twain-novels-to-remove-racial-slurs/story-e6frf96f-1225981589323.
- ^ Joe Coscarelli, "Hipster Huckleberry Finn Solves Censorship Debate by Replacing "N-Word" With "H-Word"," The Village Voice, last modified January 7, 2011, accessed April 13, 2012, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/hipster_huckleb.php.
- ^ IMDB, Huckleberry Finn (1920)
- ^ "Huckleberry Finn (1920)," IMDb, IMDb.com, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011313/.
- ^ IMDB, Huckleberry Finn (1931)
- ^ "Huckleberry Finn (1931)," IMDb, IMDb.com, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011313/.
- ^ over 4 years ago (January 10, 2008). "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Movie Reviews, Information and Film Reviews for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Movie". Movierevie.ws. http://www.movierevie.ws/movies/890030/The-Adventures-of-Huckleberry-Finn.html. Retrieved January 15, 2012.
- ^ "Thomas Mitchell Filmography," IMDb, IMDb.com, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0593775/.
- ^ Film adaptations as listed in the Internet Movie Database
- ^ "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Film Adaptions," IMDb, IMDb.com, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Digitized copy of the first American edition from Internet Archive (1885).
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at Project Gutenberg
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 125th Anniversary Edition. University of California Press, 2010.
- "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Archived from the original on 22 September 2010. http://adventuresofhuckleberryfinn.org. Retrieved September 19, 2010. Cross-browser compatible HTML edition
- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". SparkNotes. Archived from the original on 19 September 2007. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/. Retrieved September 21, 2007.
- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Study Guide and Lesson Plan". GradeSaver. Archived from the original on 31 March 2008. http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/huckfinn/. Retrieved April 9, 2008.
- "Huckleberry Finn". CliffsNotes. Archived from the original on 6 September 2007. http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/Huckleberry-Finn.id-20.html. Retrieved September 21, 2007.
- "Huck Finn in Context:A Teaching Guide". PBS.org. Archived from the original on 14 September 2007. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/index.html. Retrieved September 21, 2007.
- "Special Collections: Mark Twain Room (Houses original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn)". Libraries of Buffalo & Erie County. Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. http://www.buffalolib.org/libraries/collections/index.asp?sec=twain. Retrieved September 21, 2007.
- Smiley, Jane (January 1996). "Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second thoughts on Mark Twain’s "masterpiece"," (PDF). Harper's Magazine 292 (1748): 61–. http://www.harpers.org/archive/1996/01/0007861.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn e-book version.
