What would you do if you knew one of your friends was in trouble? Would you save them or try to avoid the situation and let someone else deal with it? This is exactly the problem that Huck Finn faces in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It is a novel about the friendship between a young boy, named Huck, and a black slave, named Jim. Throughout the plot, Huck and Jim form a bond that proves that color should not be a barrier between two people's friendship by going on endless adventures and always staying together. The author, Mark Twain, grew up in one of the fifteen slave states, which clearly influenced his writing in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River, he experienced a lot of racism and witnessed the cruelty of society (Merriman), which affected him deeply. The novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain supports the theme that friendship is found in unexpected places. Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida. When he was four years old, his family of nine moved to the banks of the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. His family was happy there but not all of his memories of the river were particularly pleasant. Because Missouri was one of fifteen slave states, it was prone to racism, and Twain grew up witnessing lynchings, mobs, racism, and general inhumane treatment of African Americans. One of Twain's most horrific memories was "the murder of a helpless slave by a merciless slave master and, of course, the grim sight of chained slaves was itself a near constant along the waterfront. the river” (Howard). The observations on the river were not Twain's only experience regarding African American slaves, although his own father and uncle both owned slaves. “When Twain visited his uncle's farm, he loved playing in the slave quarters and listening to their stories and spirituals, which he carried with him throughout his life” (http://www.marktwainhouse.org/ theman/bio.shtml) When Twain left the South forever, he felt it was his duty to repay the debt he felt white people still owed every black man because of all the cruelty that he had seen it done to them. Although the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a sequel to the light novel Tom Sawyer, it shows the darker aspects of growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River in a slave state (Howard).