Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn, escaping from his drunken, violent father, fakes his own death and hides on an island in the Mississippi, where he finds Jim, a slave who has run away from Huck's guardian's sister for fear of being sold down the river. Together they drift south on a raft, through the feuds, frauds and lynch mobs of the river towns, and fall in with two swindlers who call themselves the Duke and the King. Huck believes that helping Jim escape is a sin, and his decision, 'All right, then, I'll go to hell', is the moral centre of the book.

Mark Twain published the novel in 1884 and 1885. Told in Huck's own voice and dialect, it changed American writing, and Hemingway claimed that 'all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain'. Its language about race has made it both celebrated and banned. This edition keeps the original drawings by E. W. Kemble. It continues The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.