Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The New York Herald 18 March 1885
The sage censors of the Concord public library have unanimously reached the conclusion that "Huckleberry Finn" is not the sort of reading matter for the knowledge seekers of a town which boasts the only "summer school of philosophy" in the universe. They have accordingly banished it from the shelves of that institution.
The reasons which moved them to this action are weighty and to the point. One of the Library Committee, while not prepared to hazard the opinion that the book is "absolutely immoral in its tone," does not hesitate to declare that to him "it seems to contain but very little humor." Another committeeman perused the volume with great care and discovered that it was "couched in the language of a rough, ignorant dialect" and that "all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of inelegant expressions." The third member voted the book "flippant" and "trash of the veriest sort." They all united in the verdict that "it deals with a series of experiences that are certainly not elevating," and voted that it could not be tolerated in the public library.
The committee very considerately explain the mystery of how this unworthy production happened to find its way into the collection under their charge. "Knowing the author's reputation," and presumably being familiar with the philosophic pages of "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "The Jumping Frog," &c., they deemed it "totally unnecessary to make a very careful examination of 'Huckleberry Finn' before sending it to Concord." But the learned librarian, probably seizing upon it on its arrival to peruse it with eager zest, "was not particularly pleased with it." He promptly communicated his feelings to the committee, who at once proceeded to enter upon a critical reading of the suspected volume, with the results that are now laid before the public.
Jocelyn A. Chadwick
Why has Huck Finn consistently landed on the list of banned and challenged books?
I think that it’s landed on the list of banned books because it goes where Americans really don’t want to go. We talk about race and racism and acceptance and inclusivity and equity. We talk at that, but we don’t really listen and engage in a real substantive conversation. I think that Huck Finn will remain on the banned books list because it will remain a burr under the saddle of so many people — because it goes to the heart of what still bothers us to this day.
Duluth, MN (2018)
Stephan Witherspoon, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, called the move “long overdue.”
The literature has “oppressive language for our kids” Witherspoon said, and school should be an environment where children of color are learning equally. There are other novels with similar messages that can be taught, he said.
“Our kids don’t need to read the ‘N’ word in school,” Witherspoon said. “They deal with that every day out in the community and in their life. Racism still exists in a very big way.”
T.S. Eliot (1950)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the only one of Mark Twain’s various books which can be called a masterpiece. I do not suggest that it is his only book of permanent interest; but it is the only one in which his genius is completely realized, and the only one which creates its own category. There are pages in Tom Sawyer and in Life on the Mississippi which are, within their limits, as good as anything with which one can compare them in Huckleberry Finn; and in other books there are drolleries just as good of their kind. But when we find one book by a prolific author which is very much superior to all the rest, we look for the peculiar accident or concourse of accidents which made that book possible. In the writing of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain had two elements which, when treated with his sensibility and his experience, formed a great book: these two are the Boy and the River.
Ernest Hemingway (1935)
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Ernest J. Gaines (1988)
I know when I read it, I never thought of it as a racist novel. . . . I didn’t see it as racist. I never did see it that way. . . . I don’t think Twain was being more critical of blacks in that book than he was of a certain white mentality. He was dealing with how evil some men can be toward other men. I think that Twain was terribly critical of society. . . . It wasn’t as much antiblack as it was anti the established society at the time.
Toni Morrison (1996)
The source of my unease reading this amazing, troubling book now seems clear: an imperfect coming to terms with three matters Twain addresses—Huck Finn’s estrangement, soleness and morbidity as an outcast child; the disproportionate sadness at the center of Jim’s and his relationship; and the secrecy in which Huck’s engagement with (rather than escape from) a racist society is necessarily conducted.
James Baldwin (1979)
Writers are obliged, at some point, to realize that they are involved in a language which they must change. And for a black writer in this country to be born into an English language is to realize that the assumptions on which the language operates are his enemy. For example, when Othello accuses Desdemona, he says that he “threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.” I was very young when I read that and I wondered “richer that his tribe?” I was forced to reconsider similes: as black as sin, as black as night, blackhearted.
James Baldwin (1963)
Sign in Hannibal, MO
Albert Bigelow Paine (1912)
The story of Huck Finn will probably stand as the best of Mark Twain’s purely fictional writings. A sequel to Tom Sawyer, it is greater than its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less immediate interest for the juvenile reader. In fact, the books are so different that they are not to be compared — wherein lies the success of the later one. Sequels are dangerous things when the story is continuous, but in Huckleberry Finn the story is a new one, wholly different in environment, atmosphere, purpose, character, everything. The tale of Huck and Nigger Jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft, cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language. It has been ranked greater than Gil Blas, greater even than Don Quixote; certainly it is more convincing, more human, than either of these tales. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “It is a book I have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again to-morrow.”
E.W. Kemble (1930)
I used my young model (Cort Morris) for every character in the story--man, woman and child. Jim the Negro seemed to please him the most. He would jam his little black wool cap over his head, shoot out his lips and mumble coon talk all the while he was posing. Grown to manhood, "Huck" is now a sturdy citizen of Philadelphia, connected with an established business house.
This Negro Jim, drawn from a white schoolboy, with face unblackened, started something in my artistic career. Several advance chapters of "Huckleberry Finn" were published in the Century Magazine, then under the able editorship of Richard Watson Gilder and a select staff of assistants. My picture caught the fancy of Mr. Gilder and W. Lewis Frazer, the art director. I was asked to call and exhibit my wares. I went to Life and borrowed a few originals, but not one picture contained a Negro type.
Kemble’s Coons: A Collection of Southern Sketches (1897)
Paul Laurence Dunbar The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904)
Paul Laurence Dunbar Folks from Dixie (1899)
In 1788, Josiah Wedgwood sent a packet of his medallions to Benjamin Franklin, then president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, with the words “It gives me great pleasure to be embarked on this occasion in the same great and good cause with you, and I ardently hope for the final completion of our wishes.” Franklin wrote to Wedgwood: "I am persuaded [the medallion] may have an Effect equal to that of the best written Pamphlet in procuring favour to those oppressed people." Neither Franklin, nor Wedgwood, lived to see those wishes fulfilled.
Chapter VIII�Sleeping in the Woods—Raising the Dead—Exploring the Island—Finding Jim—Jim’s Escape—Signs--Balum
“Hello, Jim!" and skipped out.
He bounced up and stared at me wild. Then he drops down on his knees, and puts his hands together and says:
"Doan' hurt me—don't! I hain't ever done no harm to a ghos'. I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em. You go en git in de river agin, whah you b'longs, en doan' do nuffn to Ole Jim, 'at 'uz awluz yo' fren'.”
Well, I warn't long making him understand I warn't dead. I was ever so glad to see Jim. I warn't lonesome now. I told him I warn't afraid of HIM telling the people where I was. I talked along, but he only set there and looked at me; never said nothing.
Chapter XXXVIII�The Coat of Arms—A Skilled Superintendent—Unpleasant Glory—A Tearful Subject
“One er dem big cat-tail-lookin' mullen-stalks would grow in heah, Mars Tom, I reck'n, but she wouldn't be wuth half de trouble she'd coss."
"Don't you believe it. We'll fetch you a little one and you plant it in the corner over there, and raise it. And don't call it mullen, call it Pitchiola—that's its right name when it's in a prison. And you want to water it with your tears."
"Why, I got plenty spring water, Mars Tom."
"You don't WANT spring water; you want to water it with your tears. It's the way they always do."
"Why, Mars Tom, I lay I kin raise one er dem mullen-stalks twyste wid spring water whiles another man's a START'N one wid tears.”
“That ain't the idea. You GOT to do it with tears."
"She'll die on my han's, Mars Tom, she sholy will; kase I doan' skasely ever cry.”
Chapter XXXVIII�The Coat of Arms—A Skilled Superintendent—Unpleasant Glory—A Tearful Subject
Stephen Railton (1987)
The Wilkses, of course, would have been more likely to have a Bible than a dictionary at hand, but to Mark Twain in Huck Finn the dictionary is the bible. . . . By showing how Tom’s artificial, literary, imported diction distorts the reality in front of him, Twain privileges Huck’s vernacular American vocabulary. When Hemingway said that “all modern American” fiction came from Huck Finn, he was surely thinking of this linguistic emancipation.
��CHAPTER XII.�“Slow Navigation — Borrowing Things — Boarding the Wreck — The Plotters — Hunting for the Boat”��
Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn't borrow them any more—then he reckoned it wouldn't be no harm to borrow the others.
CHAPTER XVI. �Expectation—A White Lie—Floating Currency—Running by Cairo—Swimming Ashore
“Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.
CHAPTER XVI. �Expectation—A White Lie—Floating Currency—Running by Cairo—Swimming Ashore
It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, "Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell." Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm.
I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, . . .
Chapter XXXVI�The Lightning Rod—His Level Best—A Bequest to Posterity—A High Figure
“Picks is the thing, moral or no moral; and as for me, I don't care shucks for the morality of it, nohow. When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain't no ways particular how it's done so it's done. What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday- school book; and if a pick's the handiest thing, that's the thing I'm a- going to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don't give a dead rat what the authorities thinks about it nuther.”
Bibliography