Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain, 1884

Mark Twain’s novel, told by the boy Huck Finn himself, who fakes his own death to escape his violent father and drifts down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, a man fleeing slavery.

Start reading45 chapters, about 112,000 words

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Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
NoticeIn context
- Comedy
- Writing
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Chapter IIn context
- Truth & Lies
- Writing
I don’t take no stock in dead people.
Chapter IIn context
- Comedy
- Life & Death
If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain’t sleepy⁠—if you are anywheres where it won’t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.
Chapter IIIn context
- Comedy
I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
Chapter IVIn context
- Comedy
- Education
What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
Chapter XVIIn context
- Morality
Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
Chapter XVIIIn context
- Comedy
- Reading
There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.
Chapter XVIIIIn context
- Comedy
- Religion
We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
Chapter XVIIIIn context
- Freedom
It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many.
Chapter XIXIn context
- Nature
The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is⁠—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.
Chapter XXIIIn context
- Courage
- War & Peace
All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.
Chapter XXIIIIn context
- Comedy
- Power
H’aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
Ch. 26In context
- Comedy
- Democracy
I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”
Chapter XXXIIn context
- Decisions
- Morality
Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.
Chapter XXXIIIIn context
- Good & Evil

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