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difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is
obliged
to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a treadmill is work, while rolling tenpins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
    The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken place in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward headquarters to report.
    S OURCE: Mark Twain.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
. Hartford: The American Publishing Company, 1876.
    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
    Whether
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is the most important or most controversial or best loved of American novels, it is extraordinary. It is about so many topics, among them friendship, freedom, slavery and conscience. As a sequel to
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
contradicts the adage about sequels always being less good than the originals. The comic and rollicking
Huck Finn
has a depth and heft that Twain did not attempt in
Tom Sawyer
. Published in 1885, it has been banned over the years (into the present) by particular libraries and schools for any number of reasons, all of them thickheaded. We quote Twain’s “Explanatory” note to the 1885 edition: “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” He announced the scene as “the Mississippi Valley . . . forty to fifty years ago.” The novel’s plot is simple: Huckleberry narrates how he helped Jim, a slave, escape the South. On the other hand, the adventures—of which there are many—are complicated. We present a few.
    Chapter 1
    You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;
but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.
    Now the way that the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece—all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece, all the year round—more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to