While listening to Bloomberg Radio this morning, it was mentioned that 125 years ago today [The] Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was first published in the United States. If you lived in Canada or England you were able to get it two months earlier in December of 1884. Apparently someone tampered with one of the printing plate illustrations and created an obscene joke, which delayed its release in the U.S. This is another one of those books that resides in my library, but is a little bit further down the list of books I want to read. There are just too many books and not enough time to read them all at once.
The main theme of the book is the search for freedom. Even though the book was written two decades after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, it was set several decades earlier when slavery was still a fact of life. The story is about Huck, a white boy, and Jim, a runaway slave, as they drift down the Mississippi River together. It was one of the first books in American literature to be written in the native language of that particular time and place. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry Finn himself.
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