A boy and an escaped slave float down the Mississippi on a raft, and American literature finds its voice. Twain wrote it in the vernacular, in Huck's own words, and the risks he took with dialect and with subject matter scandalized his contemporaries. The novel is funny, and then suddenly it is not funny at all. Huck's decision to help Jim escape, even believing it will damn him to hell, is the moral center of the book and of American fiction. Hemingway said all American literature comes from this one book. The river keeps flowing. The raft keeps drifting toward something like freedom.