background The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written by author Samuel Clemens, who went by the pen name Mark Twain, and is set in the former slave state of Missouri. The book was preceded by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, also written by Twain, is often considered a prequel to Huckleberry Finn as it is set in a similar location and time period. Both are set in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri on the banks of the Mississippi River. Tom Sawyer ends with the titular character, a middle-class boy, and Huckleberry Finn, a poor boy with a drunkard father, stumbling upon a ton of gold. As a result, Finn's money is placed in a bank, and he is adopted by a woman named Widow Douglas.
Originally published in 1885, Huckleberry Finn came out 20 years after the end of the Civil War and 15 years after the 15th Amendment, the last to try provide Black Americans some form of constitutional rights. At the time, white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) were notorious for attacks and murder and the infamous Jim Crow were just beginning in the former confederate states. This is all to say that both de jure and de facto racism and discrimination were rife at the time of the book's publication and any progress for equality, and it is arguable there had been any, was in the past.