the adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry Finn is the main character. Huck's companion Jim, a runaway slave, provides friendship and protection while the two journey along the Mississippi on their raft.
The novel opens with Huck telling his story. Briefly, he describes what he has experienced since, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which preceded this novel.
Soon thereafter, Huck realizes Pap, who Huck hasn't seen in a very long time, has returned to claim the money Huck found, and he quickly runs to Judge Thatcher to "sell" his share of the money for a "consideration" of a dollar. Pap catches Huck after leaving Judge Thatcher, forces him to hand over the dollar, and threatens to beat Huck if he ever goes to school again.
Pap steals Huck away from the Widow's house and takes him to a log cabin. He saws his way out of the log cabin, kills a pig, spreads the blood as if it were his own, takes a canoe, and floats downstream to Jackson's Island. Once there, he sets up camp and hides out.
Jim, along with the rest of the townspeople, thought Huck was dead and is frightened upon seeing him. Soon, the two share their escape stories and are happy to have a companion.
While Huck and Jim live on the island, the river rises significantly. At one point, an entire house floats past them as they stand near the shore. Huck and Jim climb aboard to see what they can salvage and find a dead man lying in the corner of the house. Jim goes over to inspect the body and realizes it is Pap, Huck's father. Jim keeps this information a secret.
Soon afterwards, Huck returns to the town disguised as a girl in order to gather some news. Upon hearing her suspicions, Huck immediately returns to Jim and together they flee the island to avoid discovery.
As Jim and Huck continue floating downstream, they become close friends. Their goal is to reach Cairo, where they can take a steamship up the Ohio River and into the free states. However, during a dense fog, with Huck in the canoe and Jim in the raft, they are separated. When they find each other in the morning, it soon becomes clear that in the midst of the fog, they passed Cairo.
Further downstream, Huck rescues two humbugs known as the Duke and the King. Immediately, the two men take control of the raft and start to travel downstream, making money by cheating people in the various towns along the river.
Farther down the river, the King and Duke sell Jim into slavery, claiming he is a runaway slave from New Orleans. Huck decides to rescue Jim, and daringly walks up to the house where Jim is being kept. Luckily, the house is owned by none other than Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally. Huck immediately pretends to be Tom. When the real Tom arrives, he pretends to be his younger brother, Sid Sawyer. Together, he and Huck contrive a plan to help Jim escape from his "prison," an outdoor shed. Tom, always the troublemaker, also makes Jim's life difficult by putting snakes and spiders into his room.
After a great deal of planning, the boys convince the town that a group of thieves is planning to steal Jim. That night, they collect Jim and start to run away. The local farmers follow them, shooting as they run after them. Huck, Jim, and Tom manage to escape, but Tom is shot in the leg. Huck returns to town to fetch a doctor, whom he sends to Tom and Jim's hiding place. The doctor returns with Tom on a stretcher and Jim in chains. Jim is treated badly until the doctor describes how Jim helped him take care of the boy. When Tom awakens, he demands that they let Jim go free.
At this point, Aunt Polly appears, having traveled all the way down the river. She realized something was very wrong after her sister wrote to her that both Tom and Sid had arrived. Aunt Polly tells them that Jim is indeed a free man, because the Widow had passed away and freed him in her will. Huck and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being such a good prisoner and letting them free him, while in fact he had been free for quite some time.
After this revelation, Jim tells Huck to stop worrying about his Pap and reveals that the dead man in the floating house was in fact Huck's father. Aunt Sally offers to adopt Huck, but he refuses on the grounds that he had tried that sort of lifestyle once before, and it didn't suit him. Huck concludes the novel stating he would never have undertaken the task of writing out his story in a book, had he known it would take so long to complete.