really is, how keen its vision of character, how close itsobservation of life, how sound its philosophy, and how it records for us once andfor all certain phases of southwestern society which it is most important for us toperceive and to understand. “Huckleberry Finn”, it has the full favor of the Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from contactwith the soil of which he has always risen reinvigorated.8Twains skill in capturing the rhythms of that life help make the book one of the masterpieces of American literature. Huckleberry Finn, one of the central works of American literature and a worldwide best seller, traces the moral education of a young boy whose better impulses overcome both self-interest and the negative forces of his culture. Huck, a homeless boy whose only relative is his disreputable father, is taken in by a respectable widow who seeks to educate him. She forces him to go to school, but Huck dislikes being so cramped up and sivilized as they call it. His father abducts him, and Huck prefers the freedom of his father’s shack to the constraint of more genteel surroundings.Freed from civilizing influences and placed in the company of his father, a vicious racist who boasts of his own illiteracy, Huck seems like a poor candidate for moral growth. But when Pap Finn nearly kills the boy during an alcoholic delirium, Huck escapes and meets the runaway slave Jim, who provides him the opportunity to make a significant moral choice. Huck has been shaped not only by his father’s view that one should act out of self-interest, but also by his society’s belief that God’s law mandates slavery. As he protects Jim, Huck feels certain that he will go to hell. Nonetheless, he transcends his upbringing and learns to value essential human bonds of trust beyond his own interest. Throughout the novel the boy witnesses a variety of human corruption, pretension, and violence, but...
