Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published
in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.
Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the
first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular,
characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person
by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two
other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective).
The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places
along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society
that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was
published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at
entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.
Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has
also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics
since its publication. It was criticized upon release because of its
coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century
because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its
frequent use of the racial slur "nigger", despite strong arguments that
the protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is in fact anti-racist.