Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic...

A feisty young boy fakes his own death to escape his abusive father and heads off down the Mississippi River with his newfound friend Jim, a runaway slave.

"Hank Morgan, cracked on the head by a crowbar in nineteenth-century Connecticut, wakes to find himself in the England of King Arthur. The tough minded Yankee, an embodiment of scientific enlightenment, faces a world whose idyllic surface only masks the dark forces of fear, injustice, and ignorance. This is the springboard which launches one of literature's most extraordinary excursions into fantasy. With the agility of Mark Twain's unique virtuosity,...

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body-flayed and stripped of all identifying marks-drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victims identity, shape Finns story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finns terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly,...