The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By Mark Twain

Meet Mark Twain“I was born on the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri… the village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 percent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.”– The Autobiography of Mark Twain

• Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens was a self-made man. Born on the Missouri frontier, he learned several trades, traveled widely, and became a larger-than-life writer, lecturer, and a symbol of America.

• His childhood town, Hannibal MO, and people in it, served as inspiration his fictional settings and characters.

Twain’s Aspirations• At the age of 17 he left Hannibal

to work as a printer’s assistant. • When he was 21 he returned to

the Mississippi River to train as a pilot he realized this life-long dream only to have it cut short by the start of the Civil War in 1861.

• After a two-week stint in the Confederate Army, Clemens joined his brother in Carson City where he began writing humorous sketches and tall tales for the local newspaper.

• This is where he devised his pseudonym,_Mark Twain, a riverboating term meaning: “two fathoms or 12 ft deep.”

Literary Success• Clemens next worked as a miner near

San Francisco, where he heard a tall tale that he later published as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”– it was an instant success.

• He later traveled to_Hawaii Europe, and the Middle-East where he gained experiences that would evolve into his next literary success: The Innocents_ Abroad

• In 1870, he met and married Olivia Langdon, settled down in Hartford Connecticut, and worked as a successful lecturer, telling humorous stories and reading from his books.

• Other famous works include: Roughing it, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper and countless short stories.

• His death in 1910 was met with great sorrow around the world.

Notice“PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will

be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons

attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of

Ordnance.

Explanatory          IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.    I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.   THE AUTHOR.

Intro to Huck Finn• Published in1885• In some ways, Huck Finn is a

sequel to Tom Sawyer. Huck was an important member of Tom’s gang and Jim appeared as well. Both novels take place in the fictional town of St. Petersburg - modeled after Twain’s hometown of Hannibal.

• However, Huck Finn’s themes go much deeper than just the good times of the “boy’s book”, Tom Sawyer.

Satire of Huck Finn•When using satire, an author employs humor and sarcasm to expose serious flaws about society, government, or ways of thinking. •The purpose of satire is to ignite change. •The villages along the Mississippi mirrored American society as a whole in the 1880’s. •The author, through satire, exposes people’sflaws and their often, senseless prejudices owards others. •Twain is especially bitter about the effects of slavery the morality of American people

Purpose• Huckleberry Finn can be seen as hopeful. •The novel shows that:

•people can make the right decisions and defy injustice• an individual’s morals can lead them to reject what is wrong in society• sound personal values can overcome evil

Huckleberry Finn revolves around the conflict between “a sound heart and a deformed conscience.”-- Twain

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