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While The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (published in 1884, but written over a seven year period while Twain was writing several books) is the account of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley in the mid-Nineteenth Century, it is hardly a children's book. Both Huck and Jim's lives come into potentially fatal danger, and the story is rife with alcoholism, murderous feuds, robbery, fraud and, obviously, slavery. Without beating a dead horse, it's important to remember the controversies that have surrounded the novel - it has been slammed as full of irreverence, vulgarity and racism. I understand Twain's use of derogatory terms for Blacks in characters' speech as realism for a novel of that era. Along the same lines, a woman with a harelip was called "the harelip".

The prevailing view, however, is that it is one of the most original contributions to American literature. Perhaps the most unique aspect of TAOHF at the time it came out was the use of a child narrator. Twain mentioned The Adventures of Gil Blas, written by Le Sage in 1715, as a forerunner in that style, perhaps there were others. I imagine the features that have endeared it to so many also include Huck's adoration of and friendship with the Black slave Jim, and his risky actions to save him, the idyllic setting of floating down a wide river on a raft, the wonderful dialect pronunciation, the prevalence of amusing backwater superstition, Huck's self-effacing and honest internal dialogue, while his efforts to save Jim and his own hide leave him inventing outrageous lies for most everyone he confronts, and of course Twain's humor, usually at the expense of self-righteous poobahs.

On this reading, I noticed that Twain did suffer from the issue of amazing and all-too convenient coincidences of plot that are the bane of so many writers, requiring the reader to suspend disbelief to get around these stumbling blocks. The two coincidences that stuck out to me were that Jim just happened to decide to run off at the same time Huck did, because he overheard Miss Watson say she was going to sell him down to New Orleans, and that Huck happened to go to the Phelps farm, hundreds of miles from home, and they just happen to be relatives of Tom Sawyer, who is shortly due to visit !

I had forgotten that Tom Sawyer plays a significant role here as well. His most amusing trait is his penchant for romanticism. He reads adventure novels, and has decided that all of his adventures need to be characterized by the same incredible hardships that his heroes fought through, even if there is no need for the added difficulty. The scene involving Jim's liberation is a wonderful example.

One of my favorite sections of the book is Huck and Jim's temporary association with "The King" and "The Duke of Bridgewater". When the King gets mad and starts calling him "Bilgewater", I lose it every time. As I remember, that part of the story features very prominently in Roger Miller's musical Big River, adopted from the book. The music is very catchy, and I've been disappointed to notice it's absence from community theater for some time - perhaps it has suffered from the same attacks as the book. My other two favorite humorous Twain scenes are the Turkish Bath scene in The Innocents Abroad, and the scene in which boys loosen a boulder on a hillside and watch it smash through a blacksmith shop below, with people scattering like ants (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ?).