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Kindle Edition , pages. Published by Wizio first published December 10th United States of America St. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , please sign up. Nate No, it is a fiction invented on the day you were born and perpetrated with the collusion of the entirety of humanity with the sole aim of messing with …more No, it is a fiction invented on the day you were born and perpetrated with the collusion of the entirety of humanity with the sole aim of messing with your head.
In truth, not only is there no Huckleberry Finn, there was never a Mark Twain. Of course, because I've now broken the pact I'll shortly be summarily executed. This is my legacy to you, Natalia--the breaking of this horrible illusion. I just ordered this one. Should i read "Tom Sawyer" before starting this one? Mon I never read Tom Sawyer, but enjoyed the book regardless. Twain references the previous adventures, but this Huck Finn works well as a stand-alone …more I never read Tom Sawyer, but enjoyed the book regardless.
Twain references the previous adventures, but this Huck Finn works well as a stand-alone spin-off. See all 34 questions about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn…. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. I remember being terribly bored by this book. I also remember having a very incompetent teacher in 10th grade English. Maybe if I re-read it I'd find it better.
I doubt I'll re-read it though. I been there before. I located the audio which is in the public domain: Huckleberry Finn Chapter 1. Although the first few chapters were entertaining, I found myself drifting off and thinking about other things. The lazy voice of the narrator fits the book and its pace, but unfortunately there wasn't much hope of me getting anywhere near the end of this I was curious about why this is a classic and as I only made it less than halfway through the book and can't say that I was paying that much attention when I was listening, I went searching for a simpler way of learning about it.
I was pleased to find this crash course: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Part 1: This explains everything you need to know in less than thirty minutes! The most interesting comment the guy makes, after saying that Huck sees the river as a god, is that we all worship something and if it hadn't been the river, it would've been something else. That's because God created us to worship Him if only more people would realise it! For those that can't cope with that level of academia or the frantic pace of the speaker, try this alternative: I thought you'd appreciate this. I'm not going to summarise the plot as I'm sure most readers know it.
It was amusing to note that most of the people commenting on the Youtube Crash Course were students desperately trying to complete essays on the book prior to deadlines. They were all very grateful for the summary. I'm not sure how many people would choose to read this book from cover to cover. I wouldn't read this again and won't probably be bothering with the prequel Tom Sawyer. Typical mini-review for classics I've got to admit it: I skipped huge swaths of this the second time around.
Even though I was reading it for a class.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Wikipedia
Even though said class is participation-based. I honestly just winged it. It worked out, whatever. Here's how I looked the first time I read it: Twain, did you think it took a lot of balls to write an anti-slavery book two decades afte Typical mini-review for classics Twain, did you think it took a lot of balls to write an anti-slavery book two decades after slavery was abolished?
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Were your uses of the N-word and offensive stereotypes in the name of modernity? And how about your female "characters"? Were they boring sexual objects because you're just that progressive? The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is so, so much better than this. I don't even want to dwell on this anymore.
Thought I woulda been giving it 1 star. But Jim doesn't deserve the same disrespect from me that he got throughout this entire racist ass piece of shit book. Linda I really loved this book I am sorry to hear that you didn't like the book. I love all of Mark Twain's Book I really loved this book I love all of Mark Twain's Books.
This is true to form story about how people got treated back in those days and this is why I love this book so much because it is so true to form. People are getting treated the same way today as they did back than so it is not any different now than what it was back than. You should not hate this book because this was written and this was about how people got treated back than. Its not any different today than what it was back than. I love all of Mar Linda wrote: This is true to form story about how people Yes it was written when that word was ok, but the fact that my professor has to skip over it every time she reads it outloud shows how pointless keeping that word in the book is - edit it to be ACTUALLY be able to read in class or class just shouldn't be reading it anymore Those are some of the reasons I don't like this book lol Okay, I get it.
I decided to look through a 19th century lens while reading it. I still hated it. Structurally, it was a good novel. Honestly, 2 Stars is a stretch. I will give you classic books that do this way better. I was so ready to love this book. I wanted to love it.
With all my heart I wanted to read this and proclaim the literary genius of Mark Twain to anyone who would listen. And then I read it. Huck Finn was never required reading for me in high school, or in college and thank goodness. So it's been on my TBR Classics shelf for many, many years now. I did watch the Disney film when I was a kid, with the utterly adorable Elijah Wood, and I fell in love with the character right then and there Oh dear. I did watch the Disney film when I was a kid, with the utterly adorable Elijah Wood, and I fell in love with the character right then and there.
But now I'm thinking that maybe I just fell in love with Elijah Wood and those huge baby blues of his. Because of my nostalgic love for the film, when I saw an audio version of Huck Finn narrated by none other than Elijah Wood himself, I decided to pull the trigger and finally get into the source material.
I am so glad I listened to this, because if I had to read it, it would still be sitting on my bedside table, my bookmark barely nestled a quarter of the way through its pages, and me with no plans to pick it back up anytime soon. As action packed as the film was, Disney pulled out the most interesting parts of the book, embellished them with a little movie magic, and graciously cut out the coma inducing final quarter of the novel. In short, I had already seen all the good parts, and lord is there a truckload of literary nonsense in-between. For example, there is an entire chapter in which all Huck does is describe, in excruciating detail, the paintings and drawings of a dead girl.
I loved the parts with Huck and Jim on the raft, and most of the section when they fell in with the King and the Duke. And Twain is exceptional with dialect. His genius lies in crafting the voice of a character. Huck will always be a memorable character, but most of this book will be forgotten. One of my good friends described it best when she said, "I guess Twain was trying to simulate for the reader a sloooooooooooooowwwwww float down the river. Because that's what if felt like reading this. View all 4 comments. I really wanted to like it more, but it just kept dragging on.
I first read Huck Finn fifteen years ago in high school. Then I read it again or was supposed to in college. Now, I get the mis fortune of of teaching it myself to a whole new generation of students who need to be bored to death by ye olden American Literature classics.
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Students, I have a confession to make. I understand Huck Finn. I can explain Huck Finn. But nothing puts me to sleep faster than this pile of literary poo. The last quarter of the book is particularly coma inducing. But I did I first read Huck Finn fifteen years ago in high school. But I did it. And so can you. And, just like hitting yourself in the head with a spiky hammer, it feels SO good to be done with it.
Equally tedious and absurd the second time through. Any hope that my older, more educated self would appreciate this book more was effectively crushed by the erratic pacing and the ham-fisted irony. I did laugh out loud at some of Huck's antics, but those moments were infrequent. Far more time was spent wincing at the cornpone vernacular or looking at the page count to determine when overdone sections the "king" and "duke" shenanigans, the eternal preparations to free an already-free Jim would Equally tedious and absurd the second time through.
Far more time was spent wincing at the cornpone vernacular or looking at the page count to determine when overdone sections the "king" and "duke" shenanigans, the eternal preparations to free an already-free Jim would finally end. This was a read-aloud project shared with my daughter and she wasn't any more enamored of it than I. View all 5 comments. I originally read this at university. It was probably time to revisit it, having read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer much more recently, and as I remembered, it's much less of a kid's book. Bits of it are great Huck Finn is not for me.
A vernacularly accurate story bogged down with repetitious plot points and lackluster characters. This book wanders and wanders and wanders There are some great sections of this book but sometimes I was just looking for a reason to continue. The last hundred pages was the best but even still there were so many unnecessary things that happened that it just made me hate Tom Sawyer.
I liked Tom Sawyer much better. I just find this book to be very boring. Finally, I finished my first Mark Twain book. Someone must have Finally, I finished my first Mark Twain book. Someone must have moralized the hell out of Tom Sawyer. Mostly I think it is just a well-paced adventure, with unique and bizarre twists, and a cast of loveable characters. The fact that some consider this to be a piece of civil rights literature I suppose is true enough, although I would like to remind readers that Twain denied having his book say anything about anything; but if it did something for the wellbeing of blacks, it certainly helped readers to sympathize with and grow comfortable imagining a relationship with a black person who may have had little exposure to their culture.
But it still seems to me they were less to be pitied than their prejudiced, gluttonous, and hostile white brothers and sisters; and Twain does much to endear Jim to the reader despite his stereotyped manner. I thought the tapestry of lies that Huck wove every time he was in a tight spot was brilliant. It was so reflexive without any accompanying guilt to clothesline his momentum.
It was his way of life, and it was survival. Every falsehood worked to grease his escape and afford him another day to move freely on the river in the hot potential of the sun. It was especially entertaining to watch him out-con the cons. The ending of the book was the most disappointing. It truly seemed as if Twain had totally lost track of the plot. The last fourth of the book was completely taken up with Tom Sawyer entering the scene and playing an imaginative game of rescue of Jim from his captors.
I totally wanted to put the book down and call it a day. What an absolute waste of time. Not bad writing necessarily, but just arbitrary and uninteresting. Was Twain trying to stretch the story, and stick it to his publishers? More interested in his other short stories like Mysterious Stranger and others. It had my vote before I started, but lost most of it by the end.
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Read for School This is another one of those books where I can appreciate the impact it had on America, but still not enjoy it in the slightest. There are good themes running through this one, but the book itself isn't my thing at all. I get the feeling this was supposed to be humorous, and if that's the case this is far from my brand of humor. The character of Huck Finn was pretty obnoxious in my opinion.
This also seemed like it could have been condensed. It's not a huge book, but there seems li Read for School This is another one of those books where I can appreciate the impact it had on America, but still not enjoy it in the slightest. It's not a huge book, but there seems like there were a lot of chapters where nothing important happened. The writing style really didn't work for me. The two hastily load up the raft and depart. After a while, Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamship. Searching it, they stumble upon two thieves discussing murdering a third, but they flee before being noticed.
They are later separated in a fog, making Jim intensely anxious, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is not deceived for long, and is deeply hurt that his friend should have teased him so mercilessly. Huck becomes remorseful and apologizes to Jim, though his conscience troubles him about humbling himself to a black man.
Traveling onward, Huck and Jim's raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two. Huck is given shelter on the Kentucky side of the river by the Grangerfords, an "aristocratic" family. He befriends Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons.
The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons go to the same church, which ironically preaches brotherly love. The vendetta finally comes to a head when Buck's older sister elopes with a member of the Shepherdson clan. In the resulting conflict, all the Grangerford males from this branch of the family are shot and killed, including Buck, whose horrific murder Huck witnesses.
He is immensely relieved to be reunited with Jim, who has since recovered and repaired the raft. It is widely believed that this entire section of the story was included by Twain as a protest against foolish-pride feuding just as the story was also a protest against slavery , in particular the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud , which was raging at the time of the book's publication, and had many of the same basic aspects as the fictional feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. Near the Arkansas-Missouri-Tennessee border, Jim and Huck take two on-the-run grifters aboard the raft.
The younger man, who is about thirty, introduces himself as the long-lost son of an English duke the Duke of Bridgewater. The older one, about seventy, then trumps this outrageous claim by alleging that he himself is the Lost Dauphin , the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The "duke" and "king" soon become permanent passengers on Jim and Huck's raft, committing a series of confidence schemes upon unsuspecting locals all along their journey.
To divert suspicions from the public away from Jim, they pose him as recaptured slave runaway, but later paint him up entirely blue and call him the "Sick Arab" so that he can move about the raft without bindings. On one occasion, the swindlers advertise a three-night engagement of a play called "The Royal Nonesuch". The play turns out to be only a couple of minutes' worth of an absurd, bawdy sham. On the afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs is shot dead by a gentleman named Colonel Sherburn; a lynch mob forms to retaliate against Sherburn; and Sherburn, surrounded at his home, disperses the mob by making a defiant speech describing how true lynching should be done.
By the third night of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople prepare for their revenge on the duke and king for their money-making scam, but the two cleverly skip town together with Huck and Jim just before the performance begins. In the next town, the two swindlers then impersonate brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property.
To match accounts of Wilks's brothers, the king attempts an English accent and the duke pretends to be a deaf-mute while starting to collect Wilks's inheritance. Huck decides that Wilks's three orphaned nieces, who treat Huck with kindness, do not deserve to be cheated thus and so he tries to retrieve for them the stolen inheritance. In a desperate moment, Huck is forced to hide the money in Wilks's coffin, which is abruptly buried the next morning. The arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into confusion, so that the townspeople decide to dig up the coffin in order to determine which are the true brothers, but, with everyone else distracted, Huck leaves for the raft, hoping to never see the duke and king again.
Suddenly, though, the two villains return, much to Huck's despair. When Huck is finally able to get away a second time, he finds to his horror that the swindlers have sold Jim away to a family that intends to return him to his proper owner for the reward. Defying his conscience and accepting the negative religious consequences he expects for his actions—"All right, then, I'll go to hell! Huck learns that Jim is being held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps.
The family's nephew, Tom, is expected for a visit at the same time as Huck's arrival, so Huck is mistaken for Tom and welcomed into their home. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and free him; in a surprising plot twist , it is revealed that the expected nephew is, in fact, Tom Sawyer.
When Huck intercepts the real Tom Sawyer on the road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his own younger half-brother, Sid , while Huck continues pretending to be Tom. In the meantime, Jim has told the family about the two grifters and the new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", and so the townspeople capture the duke and king, who are then 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, a hidden tunnel, snakes in a shed, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from adventure books he has read, [6] including an anonymous note to the Phelps warning them of the whole scheme.
During the actual escape and resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg, while Jim remains by his side, risking recapture rather than completing his escape alone. Although a local doctor admires Jim's decency, he has Jim arrested in his sleep and returned to the Phelps. After this, events quickly resolve themselves. Jim is revealed to be a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom who already knew this chose not to reveal this information to Huck so that he could come up with an artful rescue plan for Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father Pap Finn has been dead for some time he was the dead man they found earlier in the floating house , and so Huck may now return safely to St.
Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and civilize him, he intends to flee west to Indian Territory. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted, moral, and he is not unintelligent in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters , others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word " nigger " and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance.
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 Jim's 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 " To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him, and beat him.
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When Huck escapes, he then immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatment both of them receive are radically different especially with an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim. Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole.
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. The original illustrations were done by E. 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 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 so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage.
As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in and after Twain lost the copyright.
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: Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between and Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in , 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. A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.
Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. 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. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In , the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in , opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure.
In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in , 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.
While it was clear that the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer , writing in The New York Times in , concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway 's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.
Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. Upon issue of the American edition in several libraries banned it from their shelves.
One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:. 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.
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". Twain later remarked to his editor, "Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as 'trash and only suitable for the slums. In , New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene.
When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied:. I am greatly troubled by what you say. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. 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. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. 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.
In his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn , Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain "could be uninhibitedly vulgar", and quotes critic 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".