Akron Public Library

One of the most popular books of all-time, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been both venerated and vilified since it was first published in 1885. The story of a young abused boy on the run and his friendship with a runaway slave is about loyalty, compassion, and doing what is right.

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic...

"Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been enjoyed by generations of readers across the world since its publication in 1876. With its humorous glimpses into life in nineteenth-century, small-town America, this novel has provided unique social commentary that continues to be discussed in classrooms today. Tom Sawyer, a mischievous boy growing up in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, is constantly getting in and out of...

A feisty young boy fakes his own death to escape his abusive father and heads off down the Mississippi River with his newfound friend Jim, a runaway slave.

In Robert Coover's Huck Out West, also "wrote by Huck," the boys escape "sivilization" and "light out for the Territory, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war. They are suddenly separated when Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and "dreadful lonely," hires himself out...

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body-flayed and stripped of all identifying marks-drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victims identity, shape Finns story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finns terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly,...

Tom Sawyer, an adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer.

Presents a retelling of Mark Twain's classic novel "Huckleberry Finn" about the adventures of a young boy who sets off on a journey down the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave.

An abridged version of the adventures of a nineteenth-century boy and a runaway slave as they float down the Mississippi River on a raft.