Seven Novels

#4 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

In my teens and early twenties, I would have ranked Huckleberry Finn as my number one favorite classical novel. The idea of running away from responsibility and rafting down a great river was alluring. But I grew up.

Why did Twain’s masterpiece have such a hold on me? It is not a Christian book. Still, I had read it twenty-two times before I was twenty-five. Was it the humor? The satire? The concern for the underdog? Huck’s wrestling with conscience against societal norms?

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Huckleberry Finn has been criticized for stereotyping blacks; it also used the N word. Twain’s black man is nothing like Stowe’s. It seems to me his story was so widely read that it created a picture in people’s minds just as any good novel will. Twain was opposed to racism and slavery (in theory, at least) so his use of the common language of the day is rightly ascribed to versimilitude.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the least superficial of Twain’s popular novels and is still a great yarn, full of human interest.

Continue with the Countdown: Book #3