Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with  the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark  Twain's story about a young boy and his journey  down the Mississippi was the first great novel to  speak in a truly American voice. Influencing  subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood  Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian,  T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William  Faulkner to J.D. Salinger --  Huckleberry Finn, like the river  which flows through its pages, is one of the great  sources which nourished and still nourishes the  literature of America. But he decides that he cannot stand it; he stages his own murder and, with runaway slave Jim, goes booming down the Mississippi on a raft-free of clothes, school, money and other adult inventions-and the greatest adventure story in American literature begins. For as Huck and Jim drift further south into slave country, their life is complicated by encounters with con artists, fueding families and girls in distress, until it seems that the civilization that Huck left behind will overtake the boy at last and force him to choose his manhood. Will he become a 'civilized' man, or a good one?