Quotation by Robert Penn Warren

Huckleberry Finn is a companion piece to Tom Sawyer, but a companion piece in reverse, a mirror image; it is the American un-success story, the story that had been embodied in Leatherstocking, proclaimed by Thoreau, and was again to be embodied in Ike McCaslin of Faulkner's The Bear, the drama of the innocent outside of society. Tom's story ends once he has been reclaimed by society, but Huck's real story does not even begin until he has successfully penetrated the world of respectability and, in the well-meaning clutches of the Widow and Miss Watson, begins to chafe under the ministrations.