'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

I'm willing to call Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the greatest American novel.
Published in the mid-1880s, it details the jaunt of Huckleberry Finn and the slave Jim down the Mississippi River during the antebellum days of the old South. For much of the narrative, Jim and Huck are mere players in someone else's arc, with Jim spending much of his time on the raft as Huckelberry finds himself on shore in the midst of a feud or pretending he's a girl.

Huck himself becomes a sort of a secondary character as the King and the Duke undertake their grifting ways from town to town, hoodwinking the trusting public.

The story is about freedom in a number of ways. Huck's opportunistic and freewheeling ways present America at its inception -- the land of pilgrims and frontiersmen. Huck is America, escaping his tryannical and drunk father to make his own way down the Mississippi River, the lazy river that starts in Minnesota and spits out in the Gulf of Mexico.

It also is a comment on racism and prejudice. Jim is a caring and loving character. Dumb, but he's not naive. He knows his place at that time. No one knows the score quite like Jim. Twice, Huck has the directly opportunity to lighten his load and turn Jim in, possibly for a reward. And twice he doesn't do it. This despite that Huck believes he's "sinning" by not turning in someon's slave, as if he were really taking off with someone's property.

Huck's attitudes on slavery and race isn't politically correct based on how we feel about things now. That would be ridiculous. Mark Twain in the 1880s would have had no concept of race in the 1980s or the 2000s. However, for the time, it was probably pretty radical.

Two, Huck's relationship and actions in regards to Jim have nothing to do with the color of one's skin, but it has everything to do with freedom. It's pure. Huck doesn't spare Jim's freedom nor do him and Tom Sawyer attempt to break Jim out from captivity because they think he's as equal no matter his skin color. Huck and Tom wouldn't understand our current views on race. It's not about African Americans or Asians or Middle Easterns or Hispanics. If a man is any kind of man, they would have their freedom. Freedom was everything. Not race.