Huckleberry Finn in Love and War: The Lost Journals

Dan Walker answers the questions Mark Twain avoided: What if Huck Finn carries out his promise, at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to “light out for the Territory”? Twain himself got sixty-two pages into the prairie and lost interest. But what if Huck, Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and the rest are caught up—as they surely would be—in the crisis of the Civil War? What choices will they make when history calls? For the boy who once said, “All right, then, I’ll go to Hell,” what might that mean in the Valley of Mexico, parted from the love of his life, apparently forever, or behind rebel lines in the wilderness of central Virginia, with the duty to kill or capture old friends on the other side? How would our ageless boy do in such trials? Hell might be preferable.