Mark Twain's bad boy: on its 125th anniversary, Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the great American novels. But like its protagonist, the book has often been in trouble.

• Author: Bilyeu, Suzanne
• Position: TIMES PAST

In March 1885, the Library Committee in Concord, Massachusetts, reached a decision: Mark Twain's new book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--would be banned from the town's public library. The committee was appalled by the author's use of bad grammar and rough language. One member said that "the whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people, and it is trash of the veriest sort."

The library's ban made headlines, but Twain was pleased by the uproar. After all, it was free advertising. In a letter to his business partner, the 49-year-old author said that the Concord library had given his latest novel "a rattling tip-top puff that will go into every paper in the country.... That will sell us 25,000 copies for sure."

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the publication of Huckleberry Finn in the U.S., and the book is still selling--more than 20 million copies worldwide to date--and still generating controversy. Many scholars consider it a classic of American literature. But it's also been one of the most banned books in the U.S., with some critics calling its depiction of Jim, the Missouri slave who befriends Huck, racist.

Twain himself might have foreseen some of the controversy. In the novel's final paragraph, Huck Finn says, "If I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it." And Twain included a sly warning in the preface to the book: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

"Mark Twain" was actually the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. As a boy, Twain often visited the slave cabins on his family's farm. He was fascinated by stories told by a slave named Dan, who is thought to be the model for the fictional Jim. (Dan was freed by Twain's father in 1855.)

In 1839, seeking new business opportunities, Twain's father moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri, a port city on the Mississippi River, where Twain spent most of his childhood. The Mississippi, with its steam-powered riverboats, is featured in many of Twain's best-known works, including Huckleberry Finn. And the author's pen name comes from riverboat slang: Workers would call out "mark twain" * to indicate that the water was deep enough for the boat to navigate safely.

CELEBRITY ENDORSER

By the time Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn in 1876, he had been a printer, a journalist, and a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. His books, plays, and lectures had made him wildly popular in America and in Europe. In a time before radio, movies, or television, he had become a pop-culture hero and was among...