Samuel Langhorne Clemens is better known as Mark Twain, the distinguished novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and literary critic who ranks among the great figures of American literature. He was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri and died in 1910 in Redding, Connecticut. Best remembered for his creation of the world of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Mark Twain made use of these characters throughout his career.

During his childhood he lived in Hannibal, Missouri, a Mississippi river port that was to become a large influence on his future writing. It was Twain’s nature to write about where he lived, and his nature to criticize it if he felt it necessary. As far his structure, Kaplan says, “In plotting a book his structural sense was weak; intoxicated by a hunch, he seldom saw far ahead, and too many of his stories peter out from the author’s fatigue or surfeit. His wayward techniques came

During Twain’s life, most novels were a form of uplifting entertainment and light reading that would do no harm and give enjoyment to the readers. They were written with a prime, well-behaved audience in mind, an audience that expected to read about people like themselves, and that was most comfortable reading the language they themselves used in public. In Huckleberry Finn, he introduced a character who was unlike his readers, and he had him speak in a way that probably would have offended the ears of many people. In choosing Huck as his narrator, Twain was locking his novel into an unschooled, informal dialect. No writer before Twain had been able to completely capture the dialect of a particular character.

“These types of paragraphs are used for three things simultaneously: to add a note of satire, to add to the storyline, and to continue to emphasize the child’s point of view” (Branch 214)

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain is a novel about a young boy’s coming age in the Mississippi of the mid-1800’s. It is the story of Huck’s struggle to win freedom for himself and Jim, a Negro slave. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was Mark Twain’s greatest book, and delighted world named it his masterpiece. To nations knowing it well – Huck riding his raft in every language men could print – it was America’s masterpiece” (Allen 259). The book is full of adventures and it has a good balance of humor and the informal style of speech used by many Americans. It is considered one of the greatest novels because it hides so well Twain’s opinions within what is apparently a child’s book. Ernest Hemingway went as far as to say “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (“Twain”). When he said that, among the things he had in mind were Mark Twain’s writing styles and the point of view of the novel. Few American writers have written the same after reading Twain, for he has helped change the entire country with his humor and skillful story-telling.

Other writers had used regional dialects before Mark Twain, and he had written stories himself in which characters didn’t speak the kind of English taught in schools. But with Huckleberry Finn, he introduced readers to a likable main character who spoke like someone they might meet in the street, but not at a church social. The word likable is important. It’s one of the things that makes Huck unique for this time, as fictional characters go. With Huck, Twain bro

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