Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain(1884)
Extract
All right, then, I'll go to hell.
A boy and a runaway slave push a raft into the Mississippi and drift south through a world of con artists, feuding families, and murderous drunks, and what begins as adventure becomes, without anyone noticing, a moral education. Mark Twain published this novel in 1884, and it gave American prose its voice: Huck's vernacular narration, funny and plain and quietly devastating, made everything before it sound starched. The crisis comes when Huck must decide whether to turn Jim in or accept damnation, and he chooses damnation, which is to say he chooses love over law, conscience over doctrine. Hemingway said all American literature comes from this book. He was not exaggerating by much. The river runs through every honest sentence written since.
If you loved this
Dickens sends another boy through the class system, but Pip climbs where Huck floats.
Cervantes invented the pair of mismatched companions on the road, and the comedy of conscience that follows.
Ellison picks up the question Twain left on the raft and carries it into the twentieth century.