Mark Twain's tale of a boy's picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work before it. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the sivilizing Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous Duke and Dauphin. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents of slavery, adult control and above all of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.
