To say that in Huckleberry Finn MarK Twain extended his humor into serious territory is not to say that his humor became serious, but that larger areas of seriousness came under the dominion of his humor. If the turning of serious issues into the form of humor was the substantial inversion of the book, the formal inversion lay in transforming dialect into vernacular, which is to say making it the vehicle of vision. In terms of literary history, Huckleberry Finn marks the full emergence of an American language, and although Mark Twain did not accomplish the process alone, he realized the tradition which he inherited. The "Southwest" humorists-Hooper, Longstreet, Harris and Thorpe; the comic journalists-Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, and John Phoenix; and the local colorists-Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett-had all used dialect. Yet in the humor of the old Southwest and in the literary achievements of the local colorists, the dialect was framed by a literary language which invariably condescended to it. The comic journalists, though they dropped the literary frame to appear as "characters," reduced dialect to a comic image. If the Southwest humorists tended to brutalize dialect characters and local colorists to sentimentalize them, the comic journalists, by reducing themselves to dialect, sought to give pungency and quaintness to conventional thought.
             But something altogether different happens in Huckleberry Finn. The language is neither imprisoned in a frame nor distorted into a caricature; rather, it becomes a way of casting character and experience at the same time. This combination is the fine economy of Huckleberry Finn's style. Thus when Huck
             declares at the outset that he, not Mark Twain, will write this book, the language at one and the same time defines character and action.
             You don't know about me without you have read a book
             ...