Recommendations from our site
“I chose the book largely because I think Mark Twain…is a major innovator: he expanded our sense of what the nineteenth-century U.S. novel could do, all while dramatizing how slavery’s legacy persisted into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—and on into the present day. Almost everything beautiful and troubling about this novel comes back to Twain’s complex decision to focalize a tale of shocking brutality through the perspective of a child.” Read more...
The Best 19th-Century American Novels
Nathan Wolff, Literary Scholar
“Huckleberry Finn is another romance of the divide. The trip down the Mississippi, from the Upper South border regions to the Deep South, and back again, is the movement of the plot. It’s also a romance across the color line, between Huck and his companion, Jim, who escaped slavery. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean a sexual relationship. (Although it has been argued that there’s a homoerotic bond between Huck and Jim, I think that is overheated.) The friendship and understanding between Jim and Huck is the moral center of gravity for the book.” Read more...
“Hemingway said that all American fiction comes from Huckleberry Finn. That’s true, in the sense that Twain invented a way of looking at the American experience and putting it into fiction. I think almost every American writer has to acknowledge that.” Read more...
Robert McCrum, Journalist
