"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted," Twain wrote to preface his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Originally published in 1884, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was met with mixed critical reception and even denounced for "offending propriety." Despite more than a century of weathering literary, historical, and scholarly rebuke, this enduring novel from America's greatest humorist holds a prominent place in the canon of American literature; Hemingway once wrote that Huckleberry Finn is the novel from which "all modern American literature comes. . . . There has been nothing as good since." Set in pre-Civil War Missouri and traversing the whole Mississippi River region, Twain's sequel to his picaresque novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer follows Huck as he stages his own death to escape his alcoholic father and sets off on an odyssey marked by comedy, danger, and adventure.