Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one of the first major American novels ever written in the vernacular, or common speech, being told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books). The book was first published in 1884.

Norman Mailer, likewise, had great praise saying, "The mark of how good Huckleberry Finn has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page." (NYTimes Books, 12 Dec 1984) 

The book is noted for its innocent young protagonist, its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism, of the time. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft, may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature. (From Answers.com)

Download the eBook (PDf, 1.11MB, Penn State University)

Mark Twain: Biography and Much More

Reference and Useful Links:

• Mark Twain Room (Houses original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, available freely at Project Gutenberg
• GradeSaver study guide including analysis, background and quizzes.
• Teacher's Guide at Random House
• Audio book recording with accompanying text of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Culture Shock: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Born To Trouble: Adventures of Huck Finn
• SearchLIT.org's hand-picked collection of associated links for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Free typeset PDF ebook of Huck Finn and other Twain books optimized for printing, plus extensive Twain reading list

Works by Mark Twain

• Works by Mark Twain at Project Gutenberg. More than 60 texts are freely available.
• Mark Twain Quotes, Newspaper Collections and Related Resources
• Twain on The Awful German Language
• Complete text of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
• Audio book recording with accompanying text of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Studying Twain

• The Mark Twain Papers and Project of the Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley. Home to the largest archive of Mark Twain's papers and the editors of a critical edition of all of Mark Twain's writings.
• Mark Twain Room (Houses original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn)
• The University of California Press Publishers of the critical edition of Mark Twain's writings.
• Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies
• Ever the Twain Shall Meet, a guide to Mark Twain on the Web

Twain's Life

• Full text of the biography Mark Twain by Archibald Henderson
• The Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT
• The Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, MO
• The Hannibal Courier Post A Look at the Life and Works of Mark Twain
• Mark Twain: Known To Everyone—Liked By All, a Ken Burns film shown on PBS.
• Literary Pilgrimages—Mark Twain sites

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