Almost instantly The Innocents Abroad became a best-seller and remains one of his most popular books.

What is more, in the course of writing The Innocents Abroad, the “Mark Twain” persona gradually, perhaps imperceptibly, began to become something more than an ad hoc impersonation, outfitted for the purposes of comic vision alone. His original plan was to give a comic account of his voyage with fellow travelers he eventually came to call “pilgrims.” As such, he was playing the part of irreverent journalist, whose imagination was stimulated by direct observation and recent experience. When the terms of his contract required him to produce a book manuscript much longer than he had anticipated, his notes and published “letters” to newspapers had to be supplemented by recollection. One result was that he abandoned the present-mindedness of the reporter for the broader purposes of the imaginative raconteur. He was becoming, almost in spite of himself, a “literary person.”

This is oversimplification, of course. But the fact remains that much of Twain’s best writing is the work of remembrance. Roughing It (1872) recounted experiences several years old; when “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) was written, Clemens had been away from the river more than a decade; and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a “hymn” to childhood precisely because it consisted of spontaneously youthful adventures recollected in maturity. Tom Sawyer, particularly, is nostalgic in the root sense of the word. There was likely a certain “homesickness” in Twain that motivated him to cast an eye backward to a simpler and mischievously happier time and to picture for the adult reader youth as it is remembered, perhaps at times even as it had been lived. Tom’s free play of his romantic imagination inflicted on his comrades, his successfully conducted pranks or his childish transgressions (followed swiftly by the expected punishment and the equally expected affectionate forgiveness), and his adventures in puppy love were gratifying to the writer and the reader alike.

There are in Tom Sawyer, of course, sinister elements lurking about the edges of the novel. But what is finally more disturbing than the grotesqueness and the violence in the book is the apparent fact that Tom, for all his puckish defiance of the adult powers that be, is clearly and inevitably becoming neither wise nor mature but merely becoming a grown-up. In that sense, he is an embedded reporter from antebellum St. Petersburg who disturbs but never really challenges the prevailing social order. What is more, in the final chapters he uses his persuasive influence to bring the pariah Huckleberry Finn into the fold. Huck had meandered into the novel swinging a dead cat and having definite thoughts about how to cure warts and was conceived as one more comrade for Tom. To associate with Huck at all is in the eyes of the town an act of insubordination, and as a consequence Tom revels in his company. Nevertheless, Tom envies Huck’s aimless freedom, ignorantly supposing that sleeping in a hogshead and living hand to mouth is blissful relief from constraint. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt Tom’s sincerity when, after the boys return to town to attend their own funeral, he grabs the hand of a shyly retreating Huck and exclaims, “Aunt Polly, it ain’t fair. Somebody’s got to be glad to see Huck.”

Perhaps it was at that moment that Twain recognized Huckleberry Finn was a fundamentally interesting creation. Originally, Twain wrote a concluding chapter for Tom Sawyer describing Huck’s cramped life at the Widow Douglas’s but eventually removed it from the manuscript. The opening chapter of Huckleberry Finn may in fact be a rewriting of that chapter told from Huck’s point of view. What is more certain, at any rate, is that at some time Twain saw that Huck had his own story to tell and that only he could tell it. In the summer of 1876, apparently as an idle amusement (“more to be at work than anything else,” he claimed), he began to write what he called in a letter to Howells “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” He wrote several hundred manuscript pages that summer but abruptly stopped midway through Chapter 18. “I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got,” he reported, “and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.” He did pigeonhole the work from time to time, only to return to it periodically and to increase the number and significance of Huck’s adventures. By 1883 Twain was personally proud of the result but uncertain of public reception: “I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more,” he told Howells. “And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not.”

When Twain adopted Huck’s point of view, he created a lens through which to view life along the river in the antebellum South, to survey its manners and customs, recreate its superstitions, sentimentality, and vainglorious gestures, its sloth, venality, and violence. Because Huck was not, and did not care to be, part of the social world he so effectively renders in his own distinctive and ungrammatical idiom, he perforce became the author’s satirical instrument. But Huck is a great deal more as well. He admires, or attempts to admire, all manner of affectation, from chalk fruit to Tom Sawyer’s “style” to “The Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” because he automatically assumes the existing order is somehow incontestably right. And precisely to the degree that he is excluded from that world, his earnest but failed attempts to appreciate or understand it create in the adult reader a solid contempt for sham, deception, pretense, and the like.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an experimental novel, but with a difference.