Writer and Region by Wendell Berry

I FIRST READ Huckleberry Finn when I was a young boy. My great-grandmother's copy was in the bookcase in my grandparents' living room in Port Royal, Kentucky. It was the Webster edition, with E. Â W. Kemble's illustrations. My mother may have told me that it was a classic, but I did not know that it was, for I had no understanding of that category, and I did not read books because they were classics. I don't remember starting to read Huckleberry Finn, or how many times I read it; I can only testify that it is a book that is, to me, literally familiar: involved in my family life.

I can say too that I "got a lot out of it. " From early in my childhood I was not what was known as a good boy. My badness was that I was headstrong and did not respond positively to institutions. School and Sunday school and church were prisons to me. I loved being out of them, and I did not behave well in them. Huckleberry Finn gave me a comforting sense of precedent, and it refined my awareness of the open, outdoor world that my "badness" tended toward.