Adventure · Humor
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck fakes his own death and floats down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, who is escaping slavery.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Down the river
Huck Finn has been taken in by the Widow Douglas, who means to civilize him. Then his violent, drunken father comes back and locks him in a cabin in the woods. Huck escapes by faking his own murder and hides on an island in the Mississippi, where he finds Jim, who has run away from his owner, Miss Watson, because she was about to sell him down the river. Together they set off on a raft, drifting south by night, hoping to reach the free states, through a world of feuding families, con men and small-town cruelty. Mark Twain’s novel came out in Britain in December 1884 and in the United States early in 1885.
Why it works for learners
The story is a classic road novel: a raft, a river, a series of towns and characters. The episodes are vivid, and the friendship at its center is one of the great relationships in American fiction. The novel is about slavery and racism, and it’s driven by Huck’s struggle between what he has been taught and what he comes to feel about Jim.
The challenge is the voice. Huck tells the story himself, in the spoken English of a boy with almost no schooling, and Twain renders several dialects with great care. The original also uses racist language that was common in its time. A retelling at your level lets you follow Huck and Jim clearly before you meet Twain’s voice in full.
Which level to start at
B1 for the story; B2 for the satire and the moral argument. If you read the original English at C1 or C2, know that Huck’s grammar is deliberately nonstandard; a tap explains what each phrase means in its sentence.
Read next
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Huck first appears
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain’s other great satire
- Kidnapped, another pair of unlikely friends on the run