Moving onward with Twain

After the weighty dystopias of 1984 and Brave New World, and especially their formal, oh-so-British prose, it has been a great relief to turn to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with all of its humor, rollicking Mississippi River adventures and American vernacular language. I've read remarkably little of Mark Twain, which is surprising given his eminence as one of America's greatest men of letters and the easy accessibility of his prose. One would think, at the very least, that I would have had several of his books as required reading during my school days, but no. Twain is one of the most glaring gaps in my literary acumen that I intend to rectify.

Here's a great passage from early in the book, as Huck chafes under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas.

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people.

Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.

Even at a fairly young age, Huck is worldly enough to recognize gross hypocrisy when he sees it.