the adventures of huckleberry finn book cover

He and Jim quit the island on their raft, with the free states as their destination.Ī few days in, a fog descends on the river such that Huck and Jim miss their route to the free states. However, during trip into town while disguised as a girl to gather information, Huck learns that slave-hunters are out to capture Jim for a reward. Having found a raft during a storm, Huck and Jim happily inhabit Jackson’s Island, fishing, lazing, and even investigating a house floating down the river that contained a dead body. Afterwards, Huck canoes to a place called Jackson’s Island, where he finds a man he knows from home, a slave named Jim who has run away from his owner, Miss Watson, because he had overheard that she planned to sell him. After some preparation, he fakes his own death. Huck resolves to escape from Pap once and for all.

Huck is locked up like a prisoner in the cabin, and he is at the mercy of Pap’s drunken, murderous rages, suffering many beatings from the old man. However, the two fail in their custody battle, and an infuriated Pap decides to kidnap his son and drag him across the Mississippi River to an isolated cabin. Huck goes about business as usual as the Widow and a local judge, Judge Thatcher, try to get custody of him so that he doesn’t fall into his father’s incapable and cruel hands.

Pap rebukes Huck for trying to better his life and demands that Huck give him the fortune he made after discovering the robber’s gold. So Huck does as the Widow tells him and gets to play robbers with Tom and other boys once in a while.Įven as Huck grows to enjoy his lifestyle with the Widow, his debauched father Pap menacingly reappears one night in his room. However, Huck stays with the Widow and Miss Watson because Tom tells him that, if Huck doesn’t stick with his life in straight-laced civilization, he can’t join Tom’s gang. Huck resents the “sivilized” lifestyle that the widow imposes on him. He explains that at the end of that book, he and his friend Tom Sawyer discovered a robber’s cache of gold and consequently became rich, but that now Huck lives with a good but mechanical woman, the Widow Douglas, and her holier-than-thou sister, Miss Watson.

Huckleberry Finn introduces himself as a character from the book prequel to his own, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The adventures of huckleberry finn book cover