Required Reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Hilariously picturesque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain's story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice. Influencing subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J.D. Salinger -- HUCKLEBERRY FINN, like the river which flows through its pages, is one of the great sources which nourished and still nourishes the literature of America.