Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer's Companion: Edited, with An Introduction By Bernard DeVoto

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is generally acclaimed as one of the supreme masterpieces of American literature. The product of Mark Twain's prime, it was written eight years after the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn is a more accomplished and a more serious work of art. It is also a keener realistic portrayal of regional character and frontier experience on the Mississippi River. Not only the literary critics but generations of readers young and old have been intrigued by the story, sympathetically recall Huck's escape from his drunken, brutal father to the island in the river, where he meets up with the teenage runaway slave Jim. Here is an American classic that captures the sounds, the rhythms, and the smells of life in the great central waterway of our continent. Mark Twain's penetrating social commentary-utilizing his well-honed tools of humor and realism - reveals the corruption, moral decay, and intelluctual impoverishment of the time and place. And it is all viewed through the sharp lenses of the two runaways' observations of their voyage on the raft and their experiences along the shore as they encounter itinerant actors, con men, lunch mobs, and Southern gentility. Through his companionship with Him and his own awakening conscience, Huck develops his appreciation of the dignity and worth of human life; and when Huck and his old pal Tom Sawyer meet again after their long Separation, they both - despite having been raised in a slave holding regime - conspire to help set Jim free. This Mark Twain repudiates the moral blindness of the respectable society whose decaying social order is portrayed so vividly throughout the novel.