Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain's story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice. Influencing subsequent generations of writers——from Sherwood Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J.D. Salinger——Huckleberry Finn, like the river that flows through its pages, is one of the great sources that nourished and still nourish the literature of America.