SOURCE: Kaul, A. N. “Huckleberry Finn: A Southwestern Statement.” In The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 280-304. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963.

In the following excerpt, Kaul describes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a novel that questions the moral basis of nineteenth-century American society.

The boy [Huck] and the Negro slave form a family, a primitive community—and it is a community of saints.

—Lionel Trilling, “Huckleberry Finn”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn marks in so many ways a turning point in the history of American fiction. Its crucial influence on subsequent writing in the country is widely recognized today. Novelists who came after Mark Twain and who recognized what he had done with his native idiom could hardly write again as Cooper and Melville had done. He may be called the George Washington of American letters because, by...