The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain

2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) • When Mark Twain began TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876, he probably wasn't setting out to write an American classic, and certainly not, as Ernest Hemingway later proclaimed it, the book from which "all modern American literature" flows. What started out as a simple sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer turned out to be one of the most celebrated and controversial novels in American history. • For some readers, it is simply a boy's adventure tale. For others, it is a story of the choices we must make in order to make ourselves free. For still others, it is an unsettling exploration of one of the most persistent and troubling divides our nation faces, that of race. Each generation, it seems, has its own Huck Finn.

3. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) • American writer, journalist and humorist, Twain won a worldwide audience for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. • Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. • He was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. • After his father's death in 1847, he wrote for his brother's newspaper. He later worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot. • On February 3, 1863, 'Mark Twain' was born when Clemens signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym.

4. “Mark Twain” • Clemens maintained that his primary pen name, "Mark Twain," came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms (12 ft, approximately 3.7 m) or "safe water" was measured on the sounding line. The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain" ("twain" is an archaic term for two). "By the mark twain" meant "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two fathoms".

5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) • Between 1876 and 1884 Clemens published several masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1881) and The Prince And The Pauper (1881). Life On The Mississippi appeared in 1883 and Huckleberry Finn in 1884. • In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the failure of his own publishing firm. To recover from the bankruptcy, he started a world lecture tour. Twain toured New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa.

6. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) • The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later years, and Twain died on April 21, 1910. • At the same time of Twain's death, Halley's Comet reappeared in the April skies. The last time the comet had appeared was in November 1835, the time of Twain's birth. Twain often said the he would "go out with the comet." Remarkably, his prediction came true.

7. Structural Irony • Readers of Huckleberry Finn are sometimes confused by Twain's use of irony. For example, is Twain serious that his book has no motive, moral, or plot, as he declares in the "Notice"? Some critics, after all, have taken him at his word, finding the book lacking in all. And what are we to make of this passage in chapter 32?: • Huck (as Tom): "We blowed out a cylinder-head." • Aunt Sally: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?" • Huck: "No'm. Killed a nigger." • Aunt Sally: Well it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt." • Does Twain really think it's "lucky," as Aunt Sally and Huck apparently do, that just a slave was killed in the steamboat explosion?

8. When and where do the events of the novel take place? • Setting (time) - Before the Civil War, roughly 1835–1845; Twain said the novel was set forty to fifty years before the time of its publication. • Setting (place) – Hannibal (St. Petersburg) is a legendary small riverfront city, popular with tourists internationally, located in Marion and Ralls County, Missouri. Their adventure leads to various locations along the river through Arkansas.

9. “Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” • Readers sometimes have difficulty identifying the theme of a book—especially a book such as Huckleberry Finn, which has many themes. Is this a book about race, as some have argued? Freedom, as others have argued? Moral choice and responsibility? Or is it just a boy's adventure book that somehow got out of hand?