189
See also: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 153 ■ The Sound and the Fury 242–43 ■
Of Mice and Men 244 ■ The Grapes of Wrath 244 ■ To Kill a Mockingbird 272–73DEPICTING REAL LIFE
literature? For a start, it empowered
generations of American writers
to shift literature from its center
in the New England colonies and
site their works on home soil with
local color and vernacular speech.
But what is also remarkable is the
radical heart of this free-flowing
“boy’s own” story. Twain’s novel
was published after the American
Civil War (1861–65), but is set 40 to
50 years earlier, when slaveholding
persisted in the South and settlers
were scrabbling for land in the
West. Huck’s ingenuous thoughts
reflect the numerous contradictions
at the heart of American society.Adventures down the river
Early on in the narrative, Huck
introduces himself to the reader
as an established character from
a previous novel by Twain, The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which
gives his account the credibility
of social history. He feigns death
to escape the civilizing folk of
Missouri and the brutality of his
father, and begins his journey down
the Mississippi on a raft, in the
company of Jim, a runaway slave.
As they drift south, the barbarous
reality of backwoods society
encroaches whenever they make
contact with the shore. In these
one-horse towns, lynch mobs
and gangs administer justice;
tricksters play to the weakness of
the crowd; loudmouthed drunks are
summarily shot; and a young
gentleman who befriends Huck
is murdered in a family feud.
In a text that is peppered
with the offensive word “nigger,”
subversion is played out through the
talks between Huck and Jim. Newly
escaped from being sold down the
river by his mistress, Jim concludes:“Yes—en I’s rich now ... I owns
myself, en I’s worth eight hund’d
dollars. I wished I had de money.”
Living on the raft in idyllic self-
sufficiency, Huck and Jim are cast
adrift from their social order, and
a friendship develops. Later, as
Huck wrestles with a Southern
ideology that demands he should
turn Jim in, he can remember the
man only as a friend: “we a floating
along, talking, and singing, and
laughing ... somehow I couldn’t
seem to strike no places to harden
me against him...” By the time
Tom Sawyer, the eponymous hero
of Twain’s earlier novel, steps onto
the page, Huck’s emotional
development is almost complete.
Although it was condemned as
“coarse” when it was first published
in 1884, Huckleberry Finn injected
American writing with a new
energy, style, and color. Its focus on
the speech of real Americans
stretched on through the voices
of John Steinbeck’s dispossessed
farmers in The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) to recent first-person
narratives such as Drown (1996),
Junot Díaz’s stories of Dominican-
Americans in New Jersey. ■Mark Twain
Born on November 30,
1835, Samuel Langhorne
Clemens grew up in Hannibal,
Missouri, which served as
the model for “St. Petersburg”
in Huckleberry Finn.
After the death of his
father, Clemens left school at
the age of 12; he worked as
a typesetter and occasional
writer, and in 1857 became
a steamboat pilot on the
Mississippi. During the Civil
War he prospected for silver in
Nevada, then started writing
for newspapers, adopting the
pen name Mark Twain.
In 1870 Clemens married
Olivia Langdon; they settled
in Connecticut and had four
children. Despite the success
of his novels, a series of poor
investments bankrupted him,
but from 1891 he lectured
widely, enjoyed international
celebrity, and restored his
finances. As Mark Twain,
he wrote 28 books, and many
short stories, letters, and
sketches. He died in 1910.Other key works1876 The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer
1881 The Prince and
the Pauper
1883 Life on the MississippiYou feel mighty
free and easy and
comfortable on a raft.
The Adventures of
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