The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel by the American writer Mark Twain first published in 1884; it is the ideal sequel to the previous The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and later followed by Tom Sawyer Detective and Tom Sawyer Abroad. The first-person narrator is an orphaned boy, who at some point decides to escape from human civilization in the company of a black slave: they will make a long journey of 1800 km aboard a raft along the Mississippi River. The story begins in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, based on Hannibal, the royal city in Missouri where Twain spent part of his childhood on the banks of the great river. The setting is from the early 1840s, as the first steamship sailed along the Mississippi in 1835, some twenty years before the outbreak of the American Civil War.