The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

 by Mark Twain

Hannibal, Missouri

Missouri: 9/12

   Huckleberry Finn is as relevant as it has ever been by virtue of the controversy it continues to engender by being both a stone-cold literary classic for young people AND the biggest remaining bastion of the use of the "N-word" left in society.  Listening to the Audiobook made me think of the relationship of Twain to Cervantes and Don Quixote.  It also put me in mind of The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.  As to the former, Twain was surely familiar, as to the later, he surely was not- Melville being well forgotten and The Confidence Man having made no contemporaneous impression.  That got me thinking about Huckeberry Finn itself, and the publication history- turned out that Twain started his OWN publishing company and sold Huckleberry Finn, the contemporary equivalent of selling your fashion line on QVC or self-publishing on Amazon.   I know that the publication history of Don Quixote itself was somewhat complicated in the English language- it is an epic tale and translation standards in the 18th century were loose to the point of non-existent in terms both of care and fidelity of the source material.