Mark Twain · 1884 · road

Twain's 1884 novel, and the one Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from. A boy fakes his own murder to escape his father, finds a runaway slave hiding on the same island, and the two of them float five hundred and fifty miles down the Mississippi on a raft - past the one town that could have made Jim free.

1. 1
   St Petersburg

   Twain's Hannibal, Missouri under another name - where Huck is being sivilised by the Widow Douglas, is kidnapped by his father and locked in a cabin across the river, and gets out by butchering a pig and faking his own murder.

2. 2
   Jackson's Island

   A wooded island below the town where Huck hides and finds Jim, who has run because he is about to be sold down the river - and the two of them lie up there until a raft comes by on the rising water and they take it.

3. 3
   St Louis

   They float past the biggest city on the upper river at night, all lights and no sound - and it is here that the raft chapter's argument runs: two people on fifteen feet of pine planking, and everything wrong is on the bank.

4. 4
   Cairo

   Where the Ohio joins the Mississippi, and where Jim would turn north up a free river to buy his freedom - and the fog comes down and they go past it in the dark without knowing, which is the hinge of the whole book.

5. 5
   The Grangerfords

   A steamboat runs the raft down and separates them, and Huck comes ashore on the Kentucky side into a family feuding with the Shepherdsons for reasons nobody can remember - and watches boys he likes shot in the river.

6. 6
   Bricksville

   A one-horse Arkansas town where the duke and the dauphin work their Shakespeare fraud - and where Colonel Sherburn shoots Boggs dead in the street and then faces down the lynch mob from his own porch.

7. 7
   The Wilks village

   On the east bank below Memphis, and the con the book takes most seriously: the two frauds posing as English uncles to rob three orphaned girls of their inheritance, and Huck deciding he cannot let it happen.

8. 8
   Pikesville

   Where the dauphin sells Jim for forty dirty dollars, and Huck writes the letter that would turn him in and then tears it up - all right then, I'll go to hell - which Hemingway said is where all American writing comes from.

9. 9
   The Phelps farm

   Below the White River in the cotton country, where Jim is chained in a hut and Tom Sawyer turns up and spends thirty pages making the rescue difficult on principle - having known all along that Miss Watson freed Jim two months ago.