Reimagining the Rascal

Australian author Xavier Herbert's 'Poor Fellow My Country' and the American Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' both focus on lone disaffiliated boys coming of age and finding their own way in life against explicitly detailed backgrounds of frontier instability and violence. How do these mature male authors explore such autonomous boyhoods subjected to ambiguous and often capricious rules and conditions of the frontier environment in their work especially rendering them as they do against other 'normal' children as naked unabashed children of nature?