Word: huck
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Huck, as might have been expected, is still shiftless, happy-go-lucky, not very respectable. Always a smooth liar, he took to professional story-telling years ago. Only since respectability went into a decline has he been really successful. On disreputable subjects like night fishing, adultery, peeking in at lighted windows and loafing, he is quite an authority, having had in them a lifelong interest. He can write about them, too, up to a certain incoherent point where the blissful inanity- or is it miracle?-of "just being alive" turns upon itself and leaves his lazy mind groping for words...
...books* differ little in subject matter. Both boys lived in midwestern hamlets where the livery stable, the barber's or the harness shop was the centre of culture. The church was either used as a storehouse or ignored. School was prison. The lasting impressions Huck and Tom have of school are the whisperings of bigger boys about differences and relations between men and women. Boys lay under plank bridges to spy up at passing women. Their little brothers were often born just the other side of thin partitions between bedrooms and perhaps only a night or so after they...
...Neither of their fathers paid much attention to Tom White and Huck Anderson. Their mothers gave them such "raising" as they got, which accounts for some of the differences between Tom and Huck now. Tom's mother was a college graduate and he was her firstborn. Huck's was a village girl (fictionized into a beautiful Italienne) who bore seven "brats" and drudged...
...Huck's book is offered as fiction, Tom's as an essay, but the contrast between them is broader than that. For while Huck Anderson is trying to make a work of art, still he is one of the most self-obtrusive of artists and in propounding his way of life he trespasses on sociology; and while Tom is trying to point a social moral (in effect: "Behold, we do, and should, serve youth far more nobly than youth was served yesterday!"), still he implicitly adorns a tale (in effect: "What a wonder that I turned...
...Sending bread to find drowned bodies occurs in Tom Sawyer and also in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. When Huck, escaped from his father after the latter has kidnapped him from Widow Douglas, runs away to Jackson's Island leaving signs of a foul murder, the townsfolk first fire cannon over the Mississippi River to try to raise his supposed corpse by detonation ; then, hiding on the island, Huck sees them throw loaves of bread into the current. As the loaves float down to him, Huck fishes them in, takes out the plugs, shakes dabs of quicksilver...