maintains his integrity through his ability to identify with others.Huckleberry Finn delivers its powerful message through Huck’s narration. His rich language and humor remain fresh. Huck’s journey down the river has become part of American mythology, and the issues of freedom and responsibility he confronts still concern American culture.In 1884 Twain formed the firm Charles L. Webster and Company to publish his and other writer’s works, Personnel Memoirs (Two volumes, 1885-1886 by American general and president Ulyssess S. Grant. A disastrous investment in an automatic type setting machine led to the firm’s bankruptcy in 1894. A successful world wide tour and the book based on those travels, Following the Equator (1897) paid off Twains debts. W.D. Howells (essay date 1901) writes-So far as I know Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that maybe about to follow. He has not gone through the six hundred pages of Following the Equator, without having learned more of the world as the writer saw it than any but the rarest traveler is able to show for his travel.”9Twain’s work during the 1890’s and 1900’s is marked by growing pessimism and bitterness, the result of his bad business venture and later the deaths of his wife and two daughters. The works for that period are Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) a novel set in the South before the Civil War that criticizes racism by focusing on mistaken identities . Pudd’nhead is about slavery, and the complex morality of its society. The Dawson’s Landing of this story, like St. Petersburg and Obedstown, is the Hannibal of Twain’s childhood. Again he uses the device of switched identities, the white boy raised as a slave, and the slave raised as a white. In the slave Rox...
