Ernest Hemingway is often quoted saying that, "All modern American literature comes from" Mark Twain's 1885 novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The book's plot is centered around the adventures of a boy named Huck Finn as he travels on a raft with escaped slave Jim down the Mississippi, meeting a cast of colorful characters along the way, and providing Twain with a powerful vehicle for a satiric critique of life in the American South in the years before the Civil War. The book is also noted for Twain's use of a distinctly American vernacular.
