Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of, a novel by Mark Twain, published 1884, as a sequel to Tom Sawyer.

Huck Finn, the narrator, recounts his adventures after being taken away from the Widow Douglas's by his drunken and brutal father. He escapes from his father, faking his own death, and joins up with a runaway slave, Jim, and together they make their own way down the Mississippi on a raft. Huck becomes a witness of the blood feud between the Grangerford and Shepherdson families; he and Jim are joined by two villainous confidence men, the ‘Duke’ and the ‘Dauphin’, who sell Jim into captivity again, but at the end of the book Tom reappears in time to help Huck to rescue him in a characteristically romantic and quixotic manner (unnecessarily, as it turns out, for Jim had earlier and unknowingly been given his freedom). The novel is a profound moral commentary on the nature of the ‘American experience’ and the institution of slavery, and a vital contribution to the myth of the frontier. The flexibility and power of Twain's narrative is in no way impeded by his brilliant use of various dialects.