The
Adventures of
Huckleberry
Finn
by Mark Twain
Mark Twain: a brief biography
(taken from the Mark Twain House and museum website, http://marktwainhouse.org/)
• born in 1835 in Missouri; real name was
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
• moved with his family at the age of four,
to the small frontier town of Hannibal,
Missouri on the banks of the Mississippi
River (this would later be the basis for St.
Petersburg in Huck Finn)
• father died when Clemens was 11; he
left school after finishing the 5th grade in
order to become a printer’s apprentice
• moved to New York City and
Philadelphia at the age of 18; worked on
several different newspapers
(from www.bryan.k12.ga.us )
• in 1857 (when he was 21), moved back
to MO to work as a riverboat pilot on the
Mississippi
• went to Nevada in 1861 to try
his hand at silver prospecting—it
didn’t work out
• began writing for a Nevada
newspaper where he used, for
the first time, his pen name, Mark
Twain.
• moved to San Francisco in
1864
• published his first short story in
1865
• William Faulkner called Twain
“the father of American
Literature”
• Ernest Hemingway has said
that “All modern American
literature comes from one book
by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn..."
Mark Twain in New Hampshire, 1905
from The New York Times Photo Archives
Historical Context
• When Clemens was born, Missouri was still a
fairly new state (it had gained statehood in 1820)
and comprised part of the country's western
border—so back then, it was thought of as the
frontier.
• It was also a slave state. Clemens's father
owned one slave and his uncle owned several.
In fact, Clemens spent many boyhood summers
on his uncle’s farm, playing in the slave quarters,
listening to tall tales and the slave spirituals that
he would enjoy throughout his life.
Historical Context
• The Missouri Compromise of 1820
– allowed Missouri into the Union as a slave state and,
in order to keep the balance of free and slave states,
allowed Maine in as a free state.
– this was a highly controversial and divisive
agreement
• Disagreement about slavery would persist in the
United States until 1861, when the first fighting
of the Civil War broke out.
• Huck Finn was written in 1884, but based in the
mid-1800s before the Civil War.
• We must always think of this novel in the
context of slavery.
Themes
As we discuss the novel, keep the theme topics in mind—remember
that your rough outline will be due this Friday (your entire theme isn’t
due until September 18th, mind you--we’re just getting started early).
1) Satire
2) Huck’s moral crisis
3) Jim and Huck
4) The Mississippi River
5) Individual vs. society
6) Huck and Tom
Satire
• Satire: the use of scorn or ridicule for the
purpose of exposing a folly.
– In other words, an author will often make fun of
someone or something in his work. While this ridicule
is often funny on its own, it usually serves another,
larger, purpose—to expose something that the author
disagrees with or thinks is silly about society, the
government, culture, etc…
– Scary Movie as an example of satire: What might the
makers of the movie be ridiculing? What’s their real
point, then?