'It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them'
Huck Finn spits, swears, smokes a pipe and never goes to school. With his too-big clothes and battered straw hat, Huck is in need of 'civilising', and the Widow Douglas is determined to take him in hand. And wouldn't you know, Huck's no-good Pap is also after him and he locks Huck up in his cabin in the woods. But Huck won't stand too much of this, and after a daring escape, he takes off down the Mississppi on a raft with an runaway slave called Jim. But plenty of dangers wait for them along the river - will they survive and win their freedom?
BACKSTORY: Discover how to write secret messages in code, and learn about the extraordinary Mark Twain.
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Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1935 in Missouri, USA. He trained and worked as a printer until 1857 when he became an apprentice pilot on the steamboats of the Mississippi River. After a brief spell as a miner in Nevada he took up journalism and began using the pen name Mark Twain. Some years of travelling and lecturing followed and