After the success of The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, Mark Twain began a book about Tom's more down-to-earth friend, Huckleberry Finn.The story takes place in the Mississippi Valley "forty to fifty years ago," in Hannibal, Missouri. Unlike his imaginative friend Tom Sawyer, Huck is a realist. He tolerates the efforts of his caretakers, the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, to "sivilize" him, but his preference would be to live barefoot in rags,smoking his pipe and fishing in the river.