Huckleberry Finn is one of the most controversial novels in history. It is the fifth most challenged book in United States history (About Mark Twain). It tells the tale of a young boy and a slave who venture across the Mississippi river. At the time, this was considered immoral and unheard of. The author of this story is Mark Twain. Twain was born as Samuel Clemens, but later, after he began writing, he took on the pen name of Mark Twain. This name signifies the borderline between acceptable and not acceptable- as shown in his writing. Twain had three punctilious messages in his novel. Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn to express his disillusionment of society through the eyes of a young farm boy who realized that senseless violence, racism, and slavery all expressed how cruel and corrupt people could be.
Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. There, he experienced an adventurous childhood that greatly influenced several of his stories. The town of Hannibal however, was not all it seemed to be, for Samuel experienced death and violence at an early age. When he was 9 years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he saw a slave die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron (Mark Twain Biography). Next, after he married, he travelled frequently across the country. In his travels, he experienced slavery, and racism first hand. This greatly affected him and he fought against it with the publication of Huckleberry Finn. In 1858, he became a licensed riverboat pilot (About Mark Twain). This experience allowed him to explore the Mississippi River, which played a large role in developing the novel. Twain clearly shows his social criticisms in this novel using satire.
Huckleberry Finn was publish...
... middle of paper ...
...through the eyes of a young boy named Huckleberry Finn.
Works Cited
-A&E Television Networks, LLC. (1991, March 5). Abolitionist Movement. Retrieved May 18, 2014, from History.com: www.history.com/topics/black-history/abolitionist-movement
-A&E Television Networks, LLC. (n.d.). Mark Twain Biography. Retrieved May 14, 2014, from Biography.com: www.biography.com/people/mark-twain-9512564#awesm=~oEhRSHITXnijgm
-CMG Solutions. (2006, July 6). About Mark Twain. Retrieved May 9, 2014, from The Official Website of Mark Twain: www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/about/facts.htm
-Twain, M. (1994). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (S. Appelbaum, Ed.) Mineola, New York, United States: Dover Publications, Inc.
-Weider History. (2010, September 15). Causes of the Civil War. Retrieved May 17, 2014, from HistoryNet: www.historynet.com/causes-of-the-civil-war
Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest American novels ever written. The story is about Huck, a young boy who is coming of age and is escaping from his drunken father. Along the way he stumbles across Miss Watson's slave, Jim, who has run away because he overhead that he would be sold. Throughout the story, Huck is faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to turn Jim in. Mark Twain has purposely placed these two polar opposites together in order to make a satire of the society's institution of slavery. Along the journey, Twain implies his values through Huck on slavery, the two-facedness of society, and represents ideas with the Mississippi River.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel and sequel through which Mark Twain weaves a consistent theme regarding the battle of right versus wrong. Twain presents Huckleberry Finn, or simply Huck, as the main character who finds himself on a current-driven journey down the Mississippi River to escape the abuse of his alcoholic father. The encounters of Huck and Jim, the escaped slave of the widow Mrs. Watson, serve as a catalyst for the moral based decisions in this MORAL-riddled novel.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Phd. "Teaching Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", 1995, July Summer Teachers Institute, Hartford, Connecticut @1995
Pearce, Roy Harvey. "Yours Truly, Huck Finn." One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Robert Sattlemeyer and J. Donald Crowley. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1985. Rpt. in Mark Twain. Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 159-82.
In many ways, to understand the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, the reader must also know a little about the author. Mark Twain was one of the many pen names of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born in 1835 and grew up in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. Twain is considered the father of modern American literature, primarily because of this novel. Numerous schools have banned this novel from their reading lists because they believe it to be racist. The ironic part of this is that Clemens was an abolitionist. He hoped that people would understand and be able to see the unfairness and horrors of slavery by reading his book and seeing what slavery does to people.
Rasmussen, Kent. Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to his life and Writings. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1995.
In doing so, Mark Twain traveled around the world to get his work recognized. While traveling, he would capture the memories and connect them to characters like Huck, Jim, and Tom in order to assert them in his novels, and many of his novels take place in locations he lived in. The characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are based on real people he encountered with during the time, Huck represents natural life through his desire to escape from civilization and his freedom of spirit. His novel, gave clear views of how African Americans were treated and his work displayed his humor. Also, he displayed how society interact with people like Pap and the slaves. By the time he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain came to believe that not only slavery was horrendously wrong, but that white Americans owed black Americans some form of “reparations” for the act (Huck Finn: Teachers
Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia, Pa: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Print.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. 1884. Print.
Marshall, Donald G. "Twain, Mark." World Book Advanced. World Book, 2013. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
Twain wrote in a conversational style that made his stories appealing to the common man as well as to educated people. His topics ranged from slavery, to antidotes about his travels. He lived out his dreams of adventure by visiting places like Bermuda, California, and many other exotic locations across the globe. Although Twain seemed to find fame in almost anything he wrote possibly his most famous and controversial of stories was The Adventures of Huck Finn. This was an anti-slavery novel written during the period of reconstruction in the south when slavery was a very sensitive topic in the United States. Anti-slavery views were not welcomed in the south at this time.
At the young age of twelve, Twain lost his father. Ever since the loss of his father, he began to work in various jobs. From starting as “an apprentice, then a composer, with local printers, contributing occasional squibs to local newspapers” (“Mark Twain”). The early start of responsibility was just the beginning of his career. During the time, he was working for the newspaper, for six years in the newspaper company, he “finally ended up as an assistant to his brother, Orion” (“Samuel Langhorne Clemens.”). He stayed in Iowa by his brother’s side until he
James, Pearl. “Overview of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” EXPLORING Novels. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003.
"Causes Of The Civil War." History Net: Where History Comes Alive. N.p., Sept. 2010. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2008. Print.