Views of Mark Twain as Illustrated in "Huckleberry Finn
Views of Mark Twain as Illustrated in "Huckleberry Finn"
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written by Mark Twain. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of the most exciting and adventuresome of literary lives. Raised in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age twelve to seek work. He was successively a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier (no more than a few weeks), and a prospector, miner and reporter in the western territories. His experiences furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity, as well as with the perfect grasp of local customs and speech, which exhibits itself so well in his writing. With the publication in 1865 of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist, and the best-selling Innocents Abroad solidified his fame. But it was not until Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that the literary establishment recognized him as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce.
Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Mark Twain grew more and more pessimistic-an outlook not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm. From this last period, only the stories The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and The Mysterious Stranger match his earlier work in brilliance. Though his fame continued to widen-Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees-Twain spent his last years in gloom and exasperation, writing fables about “the damned human race.” Characters •Tom Sawyer- Tom is a friend of Huckleberry Finn. Tom has an extraordinary imagination. •Huckleberry Finn- Huck is the main character of the story. His mother is dead and father is a drunk and abuses him. •Jim- Jim is the slave of Miss Watson. He is very superstitious and believes in witches. •The King- The King is a bum that, after hearing the other bum say that he was a duke, said that he was the King. Huck and Jim just go along with it so it would not start trouble. •The Duke- The Duke is a bum. He pretends that he is the rightful Duke of Bilgewater.
Huckleberry Finn is a child around the age of 14. He lives along the Mississippi River with Miss Watson. She is his guardian, because his mother is dead and his father is a drunk. His father...