The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the comic masterpiece of Samuel Langhorne Clemens who trained as a river-boat pilot (from which experience he took his pen-name, Mark Twain). His most famous book describes a boy’s journey down the Mississippi aboard a raft with the runaway black slave Jim. Their escapades in the Deep South before the American Civil War are a joy in themselves but they also direct a searching light on a society where slavery and prejudice are taken for granted and civilisation is hypocritical and corrupt.