The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
*contains spoilers* It is tempting to say that if The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain’s Iliad , then his follow up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , is his Odyssey . The earlier text, Tom Sawyer , published in 1876, concerns the fun but also frequently violent exploits of its titular character alongside his friends in and around the town of St Petersburg, Missouri (based on the town of Hannibal, in which Mark Twain – or Samuel Langhorne Clemens – spent his own boyhood years) between the years of 1830-40. This would make the American South in which the adventures were specifically situated, and indeed in which the book was written and published, pre-civil war (1861-5) and pre-Emancipation Proclamation (issued by Abraham Lincoln on 1 st January 1863). Whilst the former point on the context of the narrative is also very much true of Huckleberry Finn , taking place ‘forty to fifty years ago’ according to the frontispiece to the 1884 edition published in London by Chatto and Wi...