Mark Twain's masterpiece begins with Huck Finn's crafty escape from his brutal father, and then follows him down the Mississippi together with a runaway slave, Jim. In their exploits on Jackson's Island, on the great river, among the feuding families of Kentucy, and with two confidence tricksters, the Duke and the King, Twain gives us not only a supreme picaresque adventure story but alo an unmatched portrait of life in an America society still marked by the crudeness,vitality, cruelty and wit of the frontiersman era.

Told by the inimitably robust Huck, the tale is rich in frank observation, eloquent vernacular, and oblique moral comment - and Huckleberry Finn himself, as T.S. Eliot once wrote is "one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and other discoveries which man has made about himself".