Huck Finn by Mark Twain was arguably one of the greatest novels ever written and continues to this day to be one of the most widely read, but is this great novel really just about a boy and his friend running away from troubles or is there more than what meets the readers eye? Some say that Huckleberry Finn is strictly an adventure story, written by a man who needed a few extra dollars, and yet others argue that it is about more than that, that it was about problems in America then and problems that still remain in her to this day.
Slavery, a popular subject around the time that Huck Finn was written, and many say that that is exactly what Mark Twain had on his mind when he wrote the masterpiece about a lone boy, his stolen slave of a friend, and the adventures that they go thru.
Race is something that has been separating people since as far back as anyone can remember, it has caused many tragedies and many triumphs throughout our short history and still to this day it has an effect on an average persons everyday life. Mark Twain was a man who did not care much for race, he saw neither white nor black, and in his mind all men were created equal, he was also a man who would stand up for what he believed in, and he did not believe in slavery. Now there is much substantial evidence in Huck Finn that leads one to believe that the novel is about the issue of slavery and whether it was right or whether it was wrong, it is a battle that Huck fights throughout the book and a battle that we as Americans fought throughout a century. One key element that leads the reader to believe that Huck Finn is about race and the rights of black people is how it was one of the first novels to have an African American as a main character, in most novels in Twains era "African-American characters seldom rise above the status of minstrel show stereotypes." (Downing 2).
