Simply put, the book continues to thrive because of its original narrative style, its realistic subject matter, and its depiction of loyalty and sacrifice, regardless of the consequences. Unlike former southwestern humor characters, such as George Washington Harris’ Sut Lovingood and Johnson J. Hooper’s Simon Suggs, Huck does not rely upon an authoritative, gentleman narrator to introduce the story or help explain its significance. There is no doubt that Twain drew heavily upon his literary predecessors for inspiration, but Huck’s story is his own. He tells it from his own boyish point of view, free from any affectation, underlying motive, or purpose. In doing so, Twain created a completely original American voice. As Twain scholar Hamlin Hill noted in his introduction to the centennial facsimile edition: “No major writer before Mark Twain had dared to liberate, without explanation or apology, the common character to tell his own story in his own language, and so to dramatize a realistic version of the average American.”
Twain did more, however, than depict a realistic version of an average American boy, he also presented the squalid and cruel environment of the South in a brutal and raw manner, including its use of the horrid and offensive term, “niggers.” The unabashed narrative approach to racism and the American condition prompted American author Langston Hughes to comment that Twain’s work “punctured some of the pretenses of the romantic Old South.” By allowing Huck to tell his own story, Twain used his realistic fiction to address America’s most painful “sacred cow”: the contradiction of racism and segregation in a “free” and “equal” society.
