What is the name of the river in 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'?

What is the name of the river in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”? It is the Mississippi River. Mark Twain makes the river the novel’s central physical setting and a symbol of movement, danger, escape, and uncertain freedom.

Huck Finn and the escaped enslaved man Jim travel together on a raft down the Mississippi toward Cairo, Illinois. Jim hopes to reach a free state and eventually secure freedom for his family, while Huck is fleeing his abusive father and the pressures of so-called civilized society.

The novel is set in the antebellum American South, especially along the Mississippi and in communities shaped by slavery, social hierarchy, and river commerce. The raft gives Huck and Jim temporary independence, but towns and shorelines repeatedly bring them back into contact with coercive laws and deceptive adults.

Readers sometimes choose the Missouri River because Huck begins near St. Petersburg, Missouri, or the Ohio River because Cairo lies near its confluence with the Mississippi. Neither is the novel’s principal river: the journey itself is down the Mississippi.