125 years ago this month the world had its first glimpse of the Great American Novel, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was published in England and Canada in December 1884. (The American edition didn't appear until February 1885.) As the early promotional material promised, the book was "a mine of humor" and "a cure for melancholy." Those original readers got the laughs they were expecting. But, of course, they also got a lot more--a powerful indictment of a society that had once defended so zealously the right to buy and sell human beings like Huck's new "comrade" Jim.
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