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 which flows through its pages, is one of the great sources which nourished and still nourishes the literature of America.