A barefoot boy fakes his own murder to slip a drunk father, lights out down the Mississippi on a raft, and falls in with Jim, a man fleeing slavery — and the two of them drift south through fog and feuds and con men and one moral reckoning after another. Twain tells the whole thing in Huck's own unschooled voice, and it changed the sound of American fiction: the river a road to freedom, the shore everything wrong with the country it runs through. Funny, brutal, and still argued over — the book Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from.