The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

ReadingRate edition

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain, 1884

443 pages · 110,544 words · about 8 hours · regard 94 of 100

Download the EPUB · Read it here · The book's page

Free to read and to download. Asking the Companion about a passage is part of Reader.

Huck Finn is thirteen, living rough in a Missouri river town, when his drunken father locks him in a cabin and the civilizing mission of the Widow Douglas finally collapses. He fakes his own murder and lights out for the territory — specifically, for Jackson's Island in the Mississippi, where he finds Jim, a runaway slave belonging to Miss Watson. They take a raft downstream. The plan is Cairo, Illinois, and freedom for Jim. What they get instead is fog, feuding families, two grifters calling themselves the Duke and the King, and a series of disasters that expose every institution of the antebellum South as either brutal or absurd. Twain writes entirely in Huck's voice — unschooled, earnest, and completely unable to see what the reader sees plainly: that his "low-down" conscience, which tortures him for helping a Black man escape slavery, is more moral than anything the respectable world has to offer. Jim's dialect and Huck's country grammar feel authentic without requiring a glossary. What demands attention is the irony, which runs at full strength throughout. When Huck tears up the letter that would return Jim to captivity and says "All right, then, I'll go to hell," he is not being heroic. He thinks he's damning himself. Twain knows otherwise.

The text and its markup come from Standard Ebooks, which dedicated them to the public domain. Pages are fixed at 250 words, so a page number is the same on every screen and at every size.

More editions

All editions