Life & Background
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835 and grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi, in a slaveholding town that supplied nearly all his fiction. He was apprenticed to a printer at twelve after his father's death, worked as a journeyman across the country, and then trained as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi — the happiest work of his life, ended by the Civil War, and the source of his pen name from the leadsman's call for two fathoms. He prospected in Nevada, wrote for newspapers in the West and in San Francisco, and became famous with a jumping-frog story and then with travel books. He married into wealth, lived expensively in Hartford, lost a fortune investing in a failed typesetting machine, and lectured around the world to pay his debts. His later years brought bereavement and a darkening, anti-imperialist bitterness. He died in 1910.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn, escaping both the widow's attempt to civilise him and his violent father, fakes his own death and hides on an island in the Mississippi, where he finds Jim, a slave who has run away to avoid being sold south. The two take a raft downriver. Episodes ashore satirise the world they pass through: a murderous family feud conducted with perfect gentility, two confidence men calling themselves the Duke and the Dauphin, a lynch mob faced down by one man. The moral crisis comes when Huck writes a letter turning Jim in, considers what Jim has been to him, and tears it up, deciding he will go to hell instead. At the Phelps farm Tom Sawyer arrives and turns Jim's escape into an elaborate game, though Tom already knows Jim has been freed by his owner's will.
The novel is narrated entirely in Huck's voice, and Twain's ear for the graded dialects of the region is the point rather than the colouring — Hemingway's claim that all modern American literature comes from this one book is a claim about the vernacular becoming a literary language. The moral architecture depends on Huck's misreading of his own conscience: he believes helping Jim is a sin, and the reader watches him choose damnation over betrayal, which places the satire on the society whose morality he has absorbed. The last quarter, in which Tom reduces Jim's freedom to a boys' adventure, has been disputed since Hemingway called it cheating; later critics, including Toni Morrison, have read it as the book's most honest passage about what emancipation actually looked like. The novel's language, and its use of a racial slur throughout, has kept it at the centre of American censorship debates for a century.
Why Twain Matters
Huckleberry Finn is the book that made American vernacular a literary medium, and the line from it to Hemingway, Salinger, and Ellison is direct. It is also the standard American text for teaching the difference between a narrator's understanding and an author's, and its continuous history of being banned — first for coarseness, later for racial language — makes it central to any account of literature and censorship. Twain's late anti-imperialist essays, written against the American war in the Philippines, are increasingly taught alongside the fiction.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County1865
- The Innocents Abroad1869
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer1876
- Life on the Mississippi1883
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn1884
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court1889
- Pudd'nhead Wilson1894
- The War Prayer1923