Subscribe to our newsletter. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain's most loved, most studied, and most controversial work. It was banned upon publication in 1885 by the Concord Public Library and both it and its author were on the American Library Association's lists of the most challenged books and authors in the 1990s. Yet it is hard to imagine American literature without Huckleberry Finn.
All American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. The telling of the story in Huck's voice and from his perspective shocked contemporary critics and contributes to the continuing controversy today. It is often the genuineness of Huck's voice for the time and place in which he lived that makes the novel hard for today's readers to understand.