Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Two days downriver and the raft has slipped past Cairo in the fog, which means it is carrying Huck and Jim deeper into slave country instead of out of it, and Huck still cannot decide whether to turn his friend in. The wonder of the book is the voice: a barefoot, half-schooled boy telling his own story in the river dialect of the antebellum South, funny and sharp and wholly unable to see that he is the only decent soul in the frame. Twain crowds the banks with America at its worst, two grifters working the river towns, genteel families shooting each other over nothing, a father drunk and dangerous, until cruelty reads as the ordinary weather of the place. So when Huck resolves to help Jim run, he is certain he is damning himself, and you watch a boy do the bravest thing in American literature while believing it the worst. Few novels have made goodness this funny, or this costly to the one who carries it.