The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 UK; 1885 US) By Mark Twain

Recently I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Yes, I’ve read it before, but that was some 50 years ago, I believe when I was in middle school. Huck is such a part of American culture that I remembered every chapter – and was bored by none. Some movies reach that level, ingrained in our minds in detail forever – The Wizard of Oz, or Casablanca -- but books don’t seem to do so … maybe Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I rarely discard a book (though have loaned out many, never to see them again – hint, hint), yet I seldom re-read them. The ones I do revisit more than once seem to have a political-historical theme: The Mayor of Castro Street, Exodus, The Fire Next Time, and Silent Spring. Huck has that historical “place in time” context, but falls more so into the fiction category.

So what made me re-read Huck? 

The decision relates directly to a book I reviewed about a year ago: The Republic of Imagination by Azar Nafisi. The author (of Reading Lolita in Tehran) is an Iranian immigrant to the U.S. who “learned” about America through its literature. She cited Huckleberry Finn as her biggest influence. While I heartily agree that Huck is an American classic, I was somewhat surprised, and concerned, that it shapes a world view of the United States – actually “alarmed” might be a better word. I thought it might be time to revisit the book.

Normally in a review this is the point where one would provide a synopsis of the book to the reader, but does anyone really need to have Huckleberry Finn spelled out for them? For an American this book is about as universal knowledge as one can get – and perhaps that is one of the points Nafisi is making.

Huck is one of Mark Twain’s four Mississippi river writings, the others being: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Pudd’nhead Wilson. Though written post-Civil War, it tells of life along the fault line of America before the war. An underlying story in the book is an examination of that part of America where citizen loyalties were divided between pro-slavery advocates, and the growing abolitionist movement ... with both sides quoting the Bible. But significantly, it isn’t told as a political treatise (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin became); in Huckleberry Finn, slavery is set as a backdrop to Huck’s youthful trials (hence “The Adventures of” part of the title).

The adventures of Huck, and Jim – technically a run-away slave, set in river towns up and down the Mississippi, are what I believe caught Nafisi’ eye. Her book explores what she refers to as "the emotional basis of America as geography."  Mark Twain captured that perfectly.

Having enjoyed this re-read, maybe I’ll revisit some other classics from my youth: maybe Treasure Island or Swiss Family Robinson, who knows, maybe even the Hardy Boys.