Key Facts
Full Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Genre: Children’s novel / satirical novel
Setting: On and around the Mississippi River in the American South
Climax: Jim is sold back into bondage by the duke and king
Protagonist: Huck Finn
Antagonist: Pap, the duke and king, society in general
Point of View: First person limited, from Huck Finn’s perspective
Historical and Literary Context
When Written: 1876–1884
Where Written: Hartford, Connecticut, and Quarry Farm, located in Elmira, New York
When Published: 1884 in England; 1885 in the United States of America
Literary Period: Social realism (Reconstruction Era in United States)
Related Literary Works: The great precursor to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Both books are picaresque novels. That is, both are episodic in form, and both satirically enact social critiques. Also, both books are rooted in the tradition of realism; just as Don Quixote apes the heroes of chivalric romances, so does Tom Sawyer ape the heroes of the romances he reads, though the books of which these characters are part altogether subvert the romance tradition. It could also be said that with its realism and local color, Huckleberry Finn is a challenge to romantic epics like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which Huck might dismiss as impractical. Compare also Harriet Beecher Sotwe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that also treats the injustices and cruelty of American slavery but which, unlike Huckleberry Finn, might be considered less a literary and more a propagandistic achievement.
Related Historical Events: Twain began writing the novel in the Reconstruction Era, after the Civil War had ended in 1865 and slavery was abolished in the United States. But even though slavery was abolished, the white majority nonetheless systematically oppressed the black minority, as with the Jim Crow Laws of 1876, which institutionalized racial segregation. Mark Twain, a stalwart abolitionist and advocate for emancipation, seems to be critiquing the racial segregation and oppression of his day by exploring the theme of slavery in Huckleberry Finn. Also significant to the novel is the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that occurred in the Unties States from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Twain was critical of religious revivalism on the grounds that Christians didn’t necessarily act morally and were so zealous as to be easily fooled, a critique articulated in Huckleberry Finn.
Extra Credit
Dialect. Mark Twain composed Huckleberry using not a high literary style but local dialects that he took great pains to reproduce with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar.
Reception. A very important 20th-century novelist, Ernest Hemingway, considered Huckleberry Finn to be the best and most influential American novel ever written.
Full Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Genre: Children’s novel / satirical novel
Setting: On and around the Mississippi River in the American South
Climax: Jim is sold back into bondage by the duke and king
Protagonist: Huck Finn
Antagonist: Pap, the duke and king, society in general
Point of View: First person limited, from Huck Finn’s perspective
Historical and Literary Context
When Written: 1876–1884
Where Written: Hartford, Connecticut, and Quarry Farm, located in Elmira, New York
When Published: 1884 in England; 1885 in the United States of America
Literary Period: Social realism (Reconstruction Era in United States)
Related Literary Works: The great precursor to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Both books are picaresque novels. That is, both are episodic in form, and both satirically enact social critiques. Also, both books are rooted in the tradition of realism; just as Don Quixote apes the heroes of chivalric romances, so does Tom Sawyer ape the heroes of the romances he reads, though the books of which these characters are part altogether subvert the romance tradition. It could also be said that with its realism and local color, Huckleberry Finn is a challenge to romantic epics like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which Huck might dismiss as impractical. Compare also Harriet Beecher Sotwe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that also treats the injustices and cruelty of American slavery but which, unlike Huckleberry Finn, might be considered less a literary and more a propagandistic achievement.
Related Historical Events: Twain began writing the novel in the Reconstruction Era, after the Civil War had ended in 1865 and slavery was abolished in the United States. But even though slavery was abolished, the white majority nonetheless systematically oppressed the black minority, as with the Jim Crow Laws of 1876, which institutionalized racial segregation. Mark Twain, a stalwart abolitionist and advocate for emancipation, seems to be critiquing the racial segregation and oppression of his day by exploring the theme of slavery in Huckleberry Finn. Also significant to the novel is the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that occurred in the Unties States from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Twain was critical of religious revivalism on the grounds that Christians didn’t necessarily act morally and were so zealous as to be easily fooled, a critique articulated in Huckleberry Finn.
Extra Credit
Dialect. Mark Twain composed Huckleberry using not a high literary style but local dialects that he took great pains to reproduce with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar.
Reception. A very important 20th-century novelist, Ernest Hemingway, considered Huckleberry Finn to be the best and most influential American novel ever written.