Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Mark Twain used nineteenth-century conventions of American writing about boyhood, but he created a literary classic in the ways he overturned those conventions. The book's main character, Huckleberry Finn, is an American male icon, both in the challenges he faces moving from boyhood to manhood and in the definitions of manhood he witnesses and rejects.

Huck feels constrained by a domestic life that many men in Victorian America perceived as excessively feminized. He wants freedom from the proper and maternal Miss Watson, who expects the poor and unkempt Huck to clean up, go to school and church, and become a respectable boy. But while Huck defies the rules and self-control of Victorian manners, he also challenges the extravagant ...