On This Day in 1856

On this day in 18856, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the US, having been published 3 months earlier in the UK. Ernest Hemingway said that "All modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn" and hailed it as the "best book we've had." T. S. Eliot referred to is as a book that "creates its own category" and said of its protagonist "He sees the real world; and he does not judge it—he allows it to judge itself."

It was the first book in American literature to be written throughout in regional, vernacular English. As such, it was banned from many libraries. One incident was recounted in a Boston newspaper:

"The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people."

Louisa May Alcott said that if Twain "[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them" which is a good enough reason to ignore Louisa May Alcott.

New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene. Twain replied:

"I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave."

Much of modern criticism focuses on Twain's treatment of race. Twain was rightly considered a radical on race in his time, and Jim is accordingly the only purely good, humane character in the book. It is also, however, a product of its times and uses situations and language that today we find troublesome. In a television adaptation, CBS went to the extreme of eliminating slavery from history and Jim from the entire story just to avoid addressing a touchy issue.

Huckleberry Finn is the 5th most frequently challenged book in public schools according to the American Library Association. A Washington state high school teacher, John Foley, called for its elimination from the curriculum after the election of Barack Obama, stating that all "novels that use the ‘N-word' repeatedly need to go." Just two years ago, it, along with To Kill a Mockingbird, were removed from a school system in Virginia sue to their use of racial slurs.

Publishers have gone to absurd extremes to try to publish Huck Finn without offense. There is the Hipster Huckleberry Finn, which uses the word "hipster" to substitute for the N-word throughout. Even more absurd is the Robotic Edition, which replaces it with "robot" and even includes illustrations of Jim as a robot. In a review of one of these, scholar Thomas Wortham said it "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'"

Which is, I think, the core of the problem. There are parts of American history that are difficult, extremely unsettling, and hard to square with what we claim to be our values. Instead of using school time to learn about them, dig deeply into them, understand them, and understand how our times have both changed and not changed, lets sweep 400 years of our history under the rug in favor of not unsettling our minds.

Scholar Shelly Fiskin writes:

"In Tom Sawyer, Twain evoked aspects of the world that he had lived in as a child without bringing to bear on that world the moral awareness he had acquired as an adult. In his “schoolboy days,” Twain later recalled in his autobiography, he “had no aversion to slavery” and was “not aware that there was anything wrong about it.” But [by 1876] Twain was becoming increasingly embarrassed by his failure to question the racist status quo of the world in which he had grown up. While his own father, John Marshall Clemens, had been serving on a jury that sent “slave-stealers” to the state penitentiary, his father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, had been funding “slave-stealers’” activities. . . .

"When Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn he thought he was writing another boy’s book, a sequel to Tom Sawyer. But Twain soon found himself with several hundred pages of a manuscript like no book anyone had ever written before. It was about a child who grows up in a world in which no one—including that child—questions the God-given legitimacy of a society in which people who think of themselves as supremely civilized endorse a system that is uncivilized, illegitimate and inhumane.

"Twain wrote the book at a time when ex-slaves were subjected to economic exploitation, disenfranchisement and racially motivated lynchings, and the last third of the novel is increasingly understood as a satire of the many betrayals and indignities African-Americans endured after the breakdown of Reconstruction. Huckleberry Finn is a masterful satire not of slavery, which had been abolished a decade before Twain began writing the novel, but of the racism that suffused American society as Twain wrote the book in the late 1870s and early 1880s and which continues to stain America today."

Why would we ever want our children to think about that? They might learn something.