Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1884.
Before you read: The original text uses a racist slur often, and it shows cruelty clearly. It is a book for older students with a teacher or parent, not a read-aloud for young children.
Huck Finn fakes his death to get away from an abusive father and rafts down the Mississippi with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Huck has been taught that helping Jim is wrong. The trip keeps proving that lesson false. Twain wrote dialect, satire, and a moral argument inside a boy’s adventure. The book is famous and also genuinely painful to read because of the slur and the violence. This library includes it because it is a public-domain classic, with that warning on the first page.
Public-domain text.