INTRODUCTION BY JOHN SEELYE

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
-Ernest Hemingway

Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Intended at first as a simple story of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley - a sequel to Tom Sawyer - the book grew and matured under Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. More than a century after its publication, the critical debate over the symbolic significance of Huck and Jim's voyage is still fresh, and it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of Americna humor.

John Seelye's introduction cogently assesses the continuing impact of this novel on its readers and on other writers.

In the final paragraph of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck says, “...so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d ‘a’ knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t ‘a’ tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.” As you’ll see when you’ve read the novel, the sentiment is very much in character for Huck; but you can also read it as an expression of Mark Twain’s relief at finishing the most difficult writing task he ever tackled.
The book had taken him more than seven years to complete. At one point he was so frustrated with it that he considered burning what he’d written. Instead, he put it aside and worked on three other books that were published before Huck Finn. Twain finished the book in the summer of 1883, just before his 48th birthday.
At the time, he was not only rich, but an internationally known writer and lecturer, doing the best work of his career, and married to a woman he adored. It seems appropriate that he should have written his masterpiece during this period, the best time of his life.
Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens, and he was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town
made famous by his books. (In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he called the town St. Petersburg. “St. Peter’s town” was his way of calling Hannibal heaven.) He went to work as a printer’s assistant when he was 11 years old, just after his father died. After he turned 18, he left Hannibal to work as a printer in St.
Louis, then in New York. The printing trade got him interested in writing, and he began submitting pieces to newspapers and magazines while he was still in his teens.
He moved from one town to another, practicing his two trades, reporting and printing. He taught himself to write by writing, and eventually he sold more and more of the things he wrote.
If one thing characterized Twain as a young man, it was the urge to move on, an unwillingness to stay put. (This is one of many traits he has in common with Huck Finn.) In 1857 he decided that South America was the place to get rich. So he got on a riverboat headed for New Orleans, where he would arrange the rest of his trip.
He never made it past New Orleans, however. The trip reminded him of how much he loved not only the Mississippi River, but the riverboats that made up its most impressive traffic. He persuaded the pilot to take him on as an apprentice, and in 1859 he became a full-fledged riverboat pilot himself.
He loved that work, and he might have spent the rest of his life at it if the Civil War hadn’t closed the river to trade. He enlisted in the Confederate Army,
but he found it hard to take military service seriously. He then went west with his brother and tried mining for gold and silver.
It was during these years in the West that he established himself as a writer.
He wrote humorous stories about his experiences, which led to a job as a newspaper reporter in 1862. The following year he began signing his pieces “Mark Twain.” The words mark twain were a river pilot’s phrase that meant two fathoms deep.
In 1866 the travel bug bit him again, and he got his newspaper to send him to Hawaii. This trip was the beginning of his career as a travel correspondent. The following year he traveled through Europe and sent newspaper dispatches back home. These dispatches later became The Innocents Abroad, one of the most successful books Twain ever wrote.
His travels resulted not only in a series of books, but in a string of lecture tours that earned him large sums of money and added to his fame. The money and the fame increased even more after he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876.
That book was such a success that he decided immediately to write a sequel.
The sequel, however, evolved into something much more complex than the original book. That’s why it took Twain seven years to write it, and why he was so relieved when it was finally finished.
After Huck Finn, Twain wrote nearly a dozen books and several shorter pieces. Although none of them would match Huck Finn in literary value, his reputation was secure. Unfortunately, other aspects of his life were less benign.
He invested his money in schemes and inventions, almost every one of which was a failure. By 1893 he had lost all his money, and he owed thousands more.
He then went on a world lecture tour that allowed him to pay all his debts by
1896.
One of his daughters died while he was on the tour. He then depended more than ever on his wife, and she died in 1904. In 1909 his youngest daughter died, leaving Twain a sick and unhappy man.
Twain used to enjoy pointing out that Halley’s Comet was blazing across the sky when he was born. When he was in a macabre mood, he would sometimes predict that Halley’s Comet would announce his departure. The comet made its next appearance in the third week of April, 1910. Mark Twain died on April 21.
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” That might sound like something a teacher would say to catch your interest, but in fact it was said by one of the giants of 20th-century American literature- Ernest Hemingway.
He didn’t mean that no Americans before Mark Twain had written anything worthy of being called literature. What he meant was that Twain was responsible for defining what would make American literature different from everybody
else’s literature. Twain was the first major writer to use real American speech (and not only in dialogue), to deal with themes and topics that were important to Americans, and to assume that the concerns of Americans were as worthy of serious treatment as any ideas that ever sailed across the Atlantic from Britain.
One of the reasons we classify some writers as great is that they alter the consciousness of the people they write for; another is that they redefine the terrain for all writers who come after them. On both counts, Mark Twain is a shoo-in.
He made Americans aware of their surroundings and their heritage. And in defiance of the stilted, formal literary conventions of his day, he made it respectable to feature a hero who could barely read and write, whose language was peppered with decidedly unliterary expressions and figures of speech, and who would probably be out of place in the living rooms of most of the readers of the novel.
Twain’s reputation doesn’t rest exclusively on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and his Autobiography, not to mention dozens of shorter pieces, include some of the best writing ever done by an American in any period. But Huck Finn, even with its flaws, is his masterpiece- more penetrating, more moving, and better sustained than anything else he wrote.
If he’s one of our best writers, and this is his best book, then it has a special place in American history. You don’t have to agree with Hemingway’s statement to see that someone who hasn’t read Huck Finn has only a partial understanding
of what it means to be an American in the 20th century. The book affected everything that came after it.
But Huck Finn is not only important, it’s also great fun to read. Twain himself once said, “Everybody wants to have read the classics, but nobody wants to read them.” Huck Finn is one classic to which his statement doesn’t apply.