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Over the coming year, an international panel chosen by The Globe and Mail will select the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Each week, a single work will be discussed by an expert or a writer passionate about the work in question. This is the first in the series.

'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Thus Ernest Hemingway. And thus Mark Twain's unlikely masterpiece, a book he sort of made up as he went along (so no grand fictional architecture), a book that contemporary critics found, if not immoral, at least a possible corrupter of youth (Twain and Socrates, together at last), a book that has often, in the past half-century or so, been charged with, if not racism, then at least with discomfiting black students. But also a book that is funny, disturbing, original and often deeper than the river of its setting.

The book is a bildungsroman, a buddy story, a riverine road novel, a picaresque adventure, a funny and biting satire on American manners and morals (both found seriously wanting) and a tale of moral profundity. Yes, the novel meanders, but isn't that what T..S. Eliot called an objective correlative for the shape of the journey down the Mississippi (Eliot's "strong brown god")?

For the 10 of you who haven't read the novel, or seen any of its many film incarnations, Huckleberry Finn is the self-narrated story of a 13-year-old boy — a not-quite orphan; his Pap's so dissolute and corrupt he might as well be one — in 1830s Missouri, with all the attitudes and prejudices thereunto appertaining. Except that he's untamable, and flees the constricting embrace of "civilization" on a raft, going down the Mississippi in the company of a slave named Jim. The flow then involves a series of adventures of varying degrees of danger, fun and probability.

Which brings us to race. True, the fraught taboo word "nigger" (it's disturbing even to write it) appears more than 200 times in the novel, more than enough to distress young and inexperienced black readers without considerable guidance. But it takes a literary dolt, or naïf, not to see what Twain is at here. Huck begins by consistently belittling Jim in society, but as they move down the river, Jim's humanity, and character, slowly become clear to him. For me, the great moral centre of the novel comes when Huck, overcoming all training, apologizes to Jim for a thoughtless lie he tells after the two have been separated for a time: "I done it and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards." Major black writers such as W..E..B. Dubois, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, fans of the novel all, saw this clearly: Huck is unlearning received teachings.

Remember too that Twain was the first important novelist from west of the Mississippi, the first to use the American vernacular in his work — miraculously, at least seven distinct idioms — and the first to challenge the idea of what constituted "literary" fiction. By the time he wrote Huckleberry Finn (published in 1885 in the United States, a year earlier in Canada and Britain), he was a famous and rich paterfamilias, and Huck's rebelliousness is in some way a revival of the boy he had been and ever wanted to be.

Huckleberry Finn is, finally, the very best sort of American fiction, and, as Hemingway said, inspiration for countless thousands of other novels. It's a great in-your-face whoop and holler of a book, a truly original exploration of the moral rot at the heart of self-congratulatory society, and a boy's (and now girl's) own idyll of escapes of various kinds. As Huck declares in his famous last line, it's an invitation to readers "to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before."

Martin Levin is Books Editor of The Globe and Mail and a Twain devotee

Next week: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.