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The average reader will spend 6 hours and 8 minutes reading this book at 250 WPM (words per minute).Despite the fact that it is the most taught novel and most taught work of American literature in American schools from junior high to graduate school, Huckleberry Finn remains a hard book to read and a hard book to teach. The difficulty is caused by two distinct but related problems.This book’s Lexile measure is 980L and is frequently taught in the 9th and 10th grade. Students in these grades should be reading texts that have reading demand of 1050L through 1335L to be college and career ready by the end of Grade 12.
2nd (1st US) edition book cover | |
---|---|
Author | Mark Twain |
Pages | 366 |
OCLC | 29489461 |
Preceded by | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
Contents
How long is the book Huckleberry Finn?
2nd (1st US) edition book cover | |
---|---|
Author | Mark Twain |
Pages | 366 |
OCLC | 29489461 |
Preceded by | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
Is Huckleberry Finn easy to read?
Despite the fact that it is the most taught novel and most taught work of American literature in American schools from junior high to graduate school, Huckleberry Finn remains a hard book to read and a hard book to teach. The difficulty is caused by two distinct but related problems.
What grade do you read Huckleberry Finn?
This book’s Lexile measure is 980L and is frequently taught in the 9th and 10th grade. Students in these grades should be reading texts that have reading demand of 1050L through 1335L to be college and career ready by the end of Grade 12.
What age should you read Huckleberry Finn?
I would recommend this book to children over 10, about 13, who have already read ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ as it will introduce them to the characters in a much more vivid way.
Why is Huck Finn banned?
Huckleberry Finn banned immediately after publication
Immediately after publication, the book was banned on the recommendation of public commissioners in Concord, Massachusetts, who described it as racist, coarse, trashy, inelegant, irreligious, obsolete, inaccurate, and mindless.
Should I read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn first?
The synopsis says Twain designated Huck Finn to be the sequel to Tome Sawyer… I got confused after reading that…. Maybe it’s technically a sequel in that it takes place after the events in Tom Sawyer. But the stories are separate, so you can read either of them first and not be confused about what’s going on.
Is Huckleberry Finn an adult book?
As my classmates and I would discover in the years to come, “Huckleberry Finn” is one of those relatively rare books that is classified as too “adult” but in fact contains little if any sexually explicit material.
Is Tom Sawyer easy read?
Tom Sawyer is a fairly easy read because it was written for children. There is a lot for adults to enjoy in it, too, and Mark Twain’s satiric nature comes shining through. As an intro to his books, yes, Tom is a good place to start. For bonus fun, read the book aloud to yourself.
Is Huckleberry Finn a sad book?
In contrast, Huck Finn is alone, has no home, and his father is the town drunkard who completely ignores his son and, in his drunken rages, beats him violently. Thus, Huck has no one to take care of him. It is a sad commentary indeed that, at the end of the novel, Mr.
Is Huck Finn worth reading?
This book helps to give students a new perspective on what life was like in the early 1800s. Students are able to learn history and other life lessons from the book. Students need to experience diversity in the books they read, and Huck Finn is a great start.
Is Huckleberry Finn a great book?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is often named ‘the great American novel. ‘ It is one of the first American novels to have been written entirely in the vernacular, using the regional colour of the deep South. The story is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, Huck Finn.
What age level is Tom Sawyer?
The qualitative measures and reader and task considerations suggest that the novel is best placed at the 6th-8th grade due to social and historical matters. The Common Core Standards Test Exemplars also places the novel in the 6th-8th grade complexity band.
Is Huckleberry Finn still taught in high school?
Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been removed from the curriculum at a school in Philadelphia after its administration decided that “the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits”.
Why is Huckleberry Finn a good book?
Huckleberry Finn gives literary form to many aspects of the national destiny of the American people. The theme of travel and adventure is characteristically American, and in Twain’s day it was still a reality of everyday life. The country was still very much on the move, and during the novel Huck is moving with it.
How many chapters is Huckleberry Finn?
Consisting of 43 chapters, the novel begins with Huck Finn introducing himself as someone readers might have heard of in the past.
How many words are in Huckleberry Finn?
Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn | 145,719 |
---|---|---|
Throne of Glass | Sarah J. Maas | 113,665 |
The Golden Compass | Philip Pullman | 112,815 |
McTeague | Frank Norris | 112,737 |
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 109,571 |
How many pages is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
…
Product Details.
ISBN-13: | 9789394178342 |
---|---|
Pages: | 308 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.69(d) |
Age Range: | 8 – 10 Years |
Is the ending of Huckleberry Finn a failure?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain has been faced with a great deal of controversy when talking about the ending of the novel. Most critics see the ending to be a failure, while others see that the ending is the perfect way to end the story.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics) | Reading Length
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Wikipedia
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Contents
Plot[edit]
Characters[edit]
Themes[edit]
Illustrations[edit]
Publication’s effect on literary climate[edit]
Critical reception and banning[edit]
Controversy[edit]
Adaptations[edit]
Related works[edit]
See also[edit]
Footnotes[edit]
Further reading[edit]
External links[edit]
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Huck Finn Teachers Guide: Essay: “Teaching Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Reading Length
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How Long Would It Take to Read the Classics
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How long does it take to read Huckleberry Finn? – Answers
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How much elapsed time takes place between the beginning and end of Huckleberry Finn? – Quora
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Huck Finn Teachers Guide: Essay: “Teaching Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
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Teaching Huckleberry Finn: Why and How to Present the Controversial Classic … – John Nogowski – Google Sách
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- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for Teaching Huckleberry Finn: Why and How to Present the Controversial Classic … – John Nogowski – Google Sách Updating Nearly all of the Gadsden County’s student body is black and considered economically disadvantaged, the highest percentage of any school district in Florida. Fewer than 15 percent perform at grade level. An idealistic new teacher at East Gadsden High, John Nogowski saw that the Department of Education’s techniques would not work in this environment. He wanted to make an impact in his students’ lives. In a room stacked with battered classics like A Raisin in the Sun and To Kill a Mockingbird, he found 30 pristine, “quarantined” copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Abused by an alcoholic father, neglected by his own community, consigned to a life of privation and danger. Wouldn’t Huck strike a chord with these kids? Were he alive today, wouldn’t he be one of them? Part lesson plan, part memoir, Nogowski’s surprising narrative details his experience teaching Twain’s politically charged satire of American racism and hypocrisy to poor black teens.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1885 novel by Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or as it is known in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.
Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The book is noted for “changing the course of children’s literature” in the United States for the “deeply felt portrayal of boyhood”.[2][better source needed] It is also known for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism and freedom.
Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language and racial epithet. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist,[3][4] criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur “nigger”.
Plot [ edit ]
In St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shore of the Mississippi River, during the 1830s–1840s, Huckleberry “Huck” Finn has come into a considerable sum of money following The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and is placed under the strict guardianship of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. The women attempt to civilize him, but Huck prefers to have adventures with his friend Tom Sawyer. His father, “Pap”, an abusive alcoholic, returns to town and tries to appropriate Huck’s fortune. When this fails, Pap kidnaps Huck and confines him in a cabin in the woods.
To escape his father, Huck elaborately fakes his own murder and sets off downriver. He settles on Jackson’s Island, where he reunites with Miss Watson’s slave Jim, who ran away after overhearing she was planning to sell him. Huck decides to go downriver with Jim to Cairo, in the free state of Illinois. After heavy flooding, the two find a timber raft and an entire house floating down the river. Inside, Jim finds a body that has been shot to death but prevents Huck from viewing the corpse.[5] Huck sneaks into town and discovers there is a reward out for Jim, who is suspected of killing Huck; the two flee on their raft.
Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamer, where two thieves are discussing murdering a third. Finding that their own raft has drifted away, Huck and Jim flee in the thieves’ boat before being noticed. They find their own raft again and sink the thieves’ boat, keeping their loot. Huck tricks a watchman into going to rescue the stranded thieves to assuage his conscience. Huck and Jim are separated in a fog, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is disappointed when Huck admits the truth. Huck is surprised by Jim’s strong feelings and apologizes.
Jim and Huck on their raft, by E. W. Kemble
Huck is conflicted about supporting a runaway slave, which he has been taught is a sin. He decides to turn Jim in, but when two white men seeking runaway slaves come upon the raft, he lies to them and they leave. Jim and Huck realize they have passed Cairo. With no way of getting back upriver, they decide to continue downriver. The raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two.
On the riverbank, Huck meets the Grangerford family, who are engaged in a 30-year blood feud with the Shepherdson family, although no one remembers why the feud originally started. After a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson boy, the feud boils over and all the Grangerford males are shot and killed in a Shepherdson ambush. Huck escapes and is reunited with Jim, who has recovered and repaired the raft.
Downriver, Jim and Huck are joined by two confidence men claiming to be a King and a Duke. The swindlers rope Huck and Jim into playing along with a series of scams. In one town, the swindlers scam the townsfolk with a short and overpriced performance. On the third night, the grifters flee before the townsfolk can take revenge. In the next town, the swindlers impersonate brothers of recently-deceased Peter Wilks to steal his estate. Huck tries to retrieve the money for Wilks’s orphaned nieces. Two men claiming to be Wilks’ real brothers arrive, causing an uproar. Huck tries to flee in the confusion, but is caught by the grifters. Eventually he escapes, but finds that the swindlers have sold Jim to the Phelps family plantation. Huck vows to free Jim, despite believing he will go to hell as a consequence.
The Phelps family mistakes Huck for their nephew Tom, who is expected for a visit, and Huck plays along. It turns out their nephew is Tom Sawyer. When he arrives, he plays along with Huck’s story and develops a theatrical plan to free Jim. During the escape, Tom is wounded. Jim tends to him instead of escaping, and is arrested and returned to the plantation.[6] Tom’s Aunt Polly arrives and reveals the boys’ true identities. She explains that Miss Watson has died, freeing Jim in her will. Tom admits he knew this, but wanted to “rescue” Jim in style.[7] Jim says that Huck’s father was the dead man they found in the floating house, so Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he intends to flee west to Indian Territory to escape being adopted by the Phelps family.
Characters [ edit ]
The “King” and the “Duke”, by E. W. Kemble
In order of appearance:
Tom Sawyer is Huck’s best friend and peer, the main character of other Twain novels and the leader of the town boys in adventures. He is mischievous, good hearted, and “the best fighter and the smartest kid in town”. [8]
Huckleberry Finn, “Huck” to his friends, is a boy about “thirteen or fourteen or along there” years old. (Chapter 17) He has been brought up by his father, the town drunk, and has a difficult time fitting into society. In the novel, Huck’s good nature offers a contrast to the inadequacies and inequalities in society.
Widow Douglas is the kind woman who takes Huck in after he helped save her from a violent home invasion. She tries her best to “sivilize” (civilize) Huck, believing it is her Christian duty to do so.
Miss Watson is the widow’s sister, a tough old spinster who also lives with them. She is fairly hard on Huck, causing him to resent her a good deal. Mark Twain may have drawn inspiration for this character from several people he knew in his life. [8]
Jim is Miss Watson’s physically large but mild-mannered slave. Huck becomes very close to Jim when they reunite after Jim flees Miss Watson’s household to seek refuge from slavery, and Huck and Jim become fellow travelers on the Mississippi River.
“Pap” Finn is Huck’s father, a brutal alcoholic drifter. He resents Huck getting any kind of education. His only genuine interest in his son involves begging or extorting money to feed his alcohol addiction.
Judith Loftus plays a small part in the novel — being the kind and perceptive woman whom Huck talks to in order to find out about the search for Jim — but many critics believe her to be the best drawn female character in the novel. [8]
The Grangerfords, an aristocratic Kentuckian family headed by the sexagenarian Colonel Saul Grangerford, take Huck in after he is separated from Jim on the Mississippi. Huck becomes close friends with the youngest male of the family, Buck Grangerford, who is Huck’s age. By the time Huck meets them, the Grangerfords have been engaged in an age-old blood feud with another local family, the Shepherdsons.
The Duke and the King are two otherwise unnamed con artists whom Huck and Jim take aboard their raft just before the start of their Arkansas adventures. They pose as the long-lost Duke of Bridgewater and the long-dead Louis XVII of France in an attempt to over-awe Huck and Jim, who quickly come to recognize them for what they are, but cynically pretend to accept their claims to avoid conflict.
Doctor Robinson is the only man who recognizes that the King and Duke are phonies when they pretend to be British. He warns the townspeople, but they ignore him.
Mary Jane, Joanna, and Susan Wilks are the three young nieces of their wealthy guardian, Peter Wilks, who has recently died. The Duke and the King try to steal their inheritance by posing as Peter’s estranged brothers from England but are eventually thwarted.
Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps buy Jim from the Duke and the King. She is a loving, high-strung “farmer’s wife”, and he a plodding old man, both a farmer and a preacher. Huck poses as their nephew, Tom Sawyer, after he parts from the conmen. His intention is to try and help Jim escape.
Themes [ edit ]
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity; what it means to be free and civilized; and the ideas of humanity and social responsibility in the changing landscape of America. A complexity exists concerning Jim’s character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word “nigger” and emphasizing the stereotypically “comic” treatment of Jim’s lack of education, superstition and ignorance. This argument is supported by incidents early in the novel where Huck deliberately “tricks” Jim, taking advantage of his gullibility and Jim still remains loyal to him.[9][10]
But this novel is also Huck’s ‘coming of age’ story where he overcomes his initial biases and forms a deeper bond with Jim. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives. Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim’s friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that “a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience” and goes on to describe the novel as “…a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat”.[11]
To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck’s father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him. When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim “illegally” doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim.[12]
Some scholars discuss Huck’s own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, “by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery,” white scholars “have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain’s creative imagination at its core.” It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and Black culture in the United States.[13]
Illustrations [ edit ]
The original illustrations were done by E. W. Kemble, at the time a young artist working for Life magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that:
Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace … Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage.[14]
As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper’s and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright.[15]
Publication’s effect on literary climate [ edit ]
Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn’s Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck’s development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson River, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel’s title closely paralleled its predecessor’s: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade).[16]
Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby’s books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, “What you see is [Clemens’] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing”. For example, Twain revised the opening line of Huck Finn three times. He initially wrote, “You will not know about me”, which he changed to, “You do not know about me”, before settling on the final version, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.”[17] The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting.[18][19]
A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.[20]
Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and the United Kingdom, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States.[21] The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble’s picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps’ groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies.[22][23]
In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library’s curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In 1991, the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck’s. The library successfully claimed possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure.[24]
In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book’s publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain’s already established reputation as a “professional humorist”, having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the “dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation,” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn illustrated “previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century.”[25]
Critical reception and banning [ edit ]
In this scene illustrated by E. W. Kemble , Jim has given Huck up for dead and when he reappears thinks he must be a ghost
While it is clear that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in The New York Times in 1984, concluded that Twain’s novel was not initially “too unpleasantly regarded.” In fact, Mailer writes: “the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway’s encomiums 50 years later,” reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.[26]
Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book’s challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain’s time and today, defenders of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and ‘censors’, thus equating the complaints about the book’s ‘coarseness’ from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights.”[13]
Upon issue of the American edition in 1885, several libraries banned it from their shelves.[27] The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book’s crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:
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.[28]
Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book’s publication as well, saying that if Twain “[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them”.[29][30]
Twain later remarked to his editor, “Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!”
In 1905, 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. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically 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.[31]
Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book “devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy” after Jim is detained.[32] Although Hemingway declared, “All modern American literature comes from” Huck Finn, and hailed it as “the best book we’ve had”, he cautioned, “If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys [sic]. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.”[33][34] The African-American writer Ralph Ellison argued that “Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.”[35] Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography (Mark Twain: A Life) that “Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters”, in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim.[36]
Controversy [ edit ]
In his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain “could be uninhibitedly vulgar”, and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author’s “humor was not for most women”. However, Hearn continues by explaining that “the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out”.[37]
Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism.[38] Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim.[27] According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and, therefore, resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim’s expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes.[39]
In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely.[40]
Because of this controversy over whether Huckleberry Finn is racist or anti-racist, and because the word “nigger” is frequently used in the novel (a commonly used word in Twain’s time that has since become vulgar and taboo), many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school system—this questioning of the word “nigger” is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the “most grotesque example of racism I’ve ever seen in my life”.[41] According to the American Library Association, Huckleberry Finn was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States during the 1990s.[42]
There have been several more recent cases involving protests for the banning of the novel. In 2003, high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother, Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, proposed banning the book from classroom learning in the Renton School District, though not from any public libraries, because of the word “nigger”. The two curriculum committees that considered her request eventually decided to keep the novel on the 11th grade curriculum, though they suspended it until a panel had time to review the novel and set a specific teaching procedure for the novel’s controversial topics.[43]
In 2009, a Washington state high school teacher, John Foley, called for replacing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a more modern novel.[44] In an opinion column that Foley wrote in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, he states that all “novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go.” He states that teaching the novel is not only unnecessary, but difficult due to the offensive language within the novel with many students becoming uncomfortable at “just hear[ing] the N-word.”[45]
In 2016, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was removed from a public school district in Virginia, along with the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, due to their use of racial slurs.[46][47]
Expurgated editions [ edit ]
Publishers have made their own attempts at easing the controversy by way of releasing editions of the book with the word “nigger” replaced by less controversial words. A 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books, employed the word “slave” (although the word is not properly applied to a freed man). Their argument for making the change was to offer the reader a choice of reading a “sanitized” version if they were not comfortable with the original.[48] Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be more friendly for use in classrooms, rather than have the work banned outright from classroom reading lists due to its language.[49]
According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa, “At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.”[50] Another scholar, Thomas Wortham, criticized the changes, saying the new edition “doesn’t challenge children to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'”[51]
Adaptations [ edit ]
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Other [ edit ]
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Further reading [ edit ]
Huck Finn Teachers Guide: Essay: “Teaching Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor of American Studies and English at the University of Texas, is the author of Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (Oxford University Press, 1993). She is President of the Mark Twain Circle of America and editor of the 19-volume Oxford Mark Twain. Adapted from a talk given at the July 1995 Summer Teachers’ Institute at The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut. ©1995 Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Despite the fact that it is the most taught novel and most taught work of American literature in American schools from junior high to graduate school, Huckleberry Finn remains a hard book to read and a hard book to teach. The difficulty is caused by two distinct but related problems. First, one must understand how Socratic irony works if the novel is to make any sense at all; most students don’t. Secondly, one must be able to place the novel in a larger historical and literary context — one that includes the history of American racism and the literary productions of African-American writers — if the book is to be read as anything more than a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which it both is and is not); most students can’t. These two problems pose real obstacles for teachers. Are they surmountable? Under some circumstances, yes. Under others, perhaps not. I think under most circumstances, however, they are obstacles you can deal with. It is impossible to read Huck Finn intelligently without understanding that Mark Twain’s consciousness and awareness is larger than that of any of the characters in the novel, including Huck. Indeed, part of what makes the book so effective is the fact that Huck is too innocent and ignorant to understand what’s wrong with his society and what’s right about his own transgressive behavior. Twain, on the other hand, knows the score. One must be skeptical about most of what Huck says in order to hear what Twain is saying. In a 1991 interview, Ralph Ellison suggested that critics who condemn Twain for the portrait of Jim that we get in the book forget that “one also has to look at the teller of the tale, and realize that you are getting a black man, an adult, seen through the condescending eyes — partially — of a young white boy.” Are you saying, I asked Ellison, “that those critics are making the same old mistake of confusing the narrator with the author? That they’re saying that Twain saw him that way rather than that Huck did?” “Yes,” was Ellison’s answer. Clemens as a child accepted without question, as Huck did, the idea that slaves were property; neither wanted to be called a “low-down Abolitionist” if he could possibly help it. Between the time of that Hannibal childhood and adolescence, however, and the years in which Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s consciousness changed. By 1885, when the book was published, Samuel Clemens held views that were very different from those he ascribed to Huck. It might be helpful at this point to chart for your students the growth of the author’s developing moral awareness on the subject of race and racism — starting with some of his writings on the persecution of the Chinese in San Francisco (such as Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy), then moving through his marriage into an abolitionist family, the 1869 anti-lynching editorial that he published in The Buffalo Express entitled Only a Nigger, and his exposure to figures like Frederick Douglass and his father-in-law, Jervis Langdon. By the time he wrote Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemens had come to believe not only that slavery was a horrendous wrong, but that white Americans owed black Americans some form of “reparations” for it. One graphic way to demonstrate this fact to your students is to share with them the letter Twain wrote to the Dean of the Yale Law School in 1885, in which he explained why he wanted to pay the expenses of Warner McGuinn, one of the first black law students at Yale. “We have ground the manhood out of them,” Twain wrote Dean Wayland on Christmas Eve, 1885, “and the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.” Ask your students: why does a writer who holds these views create a narrator who is too innocent and ignorant to challenge the topsy-turvy moral universe that surrounds him? “All right, then, I’ll go to Hell,” Huck says when he decides not to return Jim to slavery. Samuel Clemens might be convinced that slavery itself and its legacy are filled with shame, but Huck is convinced that his reward for defying the moral norms of his society will be eternal damnation. Something new happened in Huck Finn that had never happened in American literature before. It was a book, as many critics have observed, that served as a Declaration of Independence from the genteel English novel tradition. Huckleberry Finn allowed a different kind of writing to happen: a clean, crisp, no-nonsense, earthy vernacular kind of writing that jumped off the printed page with unprecedented immediacy and energy; it was a book that talked. Huck’s voice, combined with Twain’s satiric genius, changed the shape of fiction in America, and African-American voices had a great deal to do with making it what it was. Expose your students to the work of some of Twain’s African-American contemporaries, such as Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Those voices can greatly enrich students’ understanding of both the issues Huckleberry Finn raises and the vernacular style in which it raises them. If W.E.B. Du Bois was right that the problem of the twentieth century is the color line, one would never know it from the average secondary-school syllabus, which often avoids issues of race almost completely. Like a Trojan horse, however, Huck Finn can slip into the American literature classroom as a “classic,” only to engulf students in heated debates about prejudice and racism, conformity, autonomy, authority, slavery and freedom. It is a book that puts on the table the very questions the culture so often tries to bury, a book that opens out into the complex history that shaped it — the history of the ante-bellum era in which the story is set, and the history of the post-war period in which the book was written — and it requires us to address that history as well. Much of that history is painful. Indeed, it is to avoid confronting the raw pain of that history that black parents sometimes mobilize to ban the novel. Brushing history aside, however, is no solution to the larger challenge of dealing with its legacy. Neither is placing the task of dealing with it on one book. We continue to live, as a nation, in the shadow of racism while being simultaneously committed, on paper, to principles of equality. As Ralph Ellison observed in our interview, it is this irony at the core of the American experience that Mark Twain forces us to confront head-on. History as it is taught in the history classroom is often denatured and dry. You can keep your distance from it if you choose. Slaveholding was evil. Injustice was the law of the land. History books teach that. But they don’t require you to look the perpetrators of that evil in the eye and find yourself looking at a kind, gentle, good-hearted Aunt Sally. They don’t make you understand that it was not the villains who made the system work, but the ordinary folks, the good folks, the folks, who did nothing more than fail to question the set of circumstances that surrounded them, who failed to judge that evil as evil and who deluded themselves into thinking they were doing good, earning safe passage for themselves into heaven. When accomplished fiction writers expose the all-too-human betrayals that well-meaning human beings perpetrate in the name of business-as-usual, they disrupt the ordered rationalizations that insulate the heart from pain. Novelists, like surgeons, cut straight to the heart. But unlike surgeons, they don’t sew up the wound. They leave it open to heal or fester, depending on the septic level of the reader’s own environment. Irony, history, and racism all painfully intertwine in our past and present, and they all come together in Huck Finn. Because racism is endemic to our society, a book like Huck Finn, which brings the problem to the surface, can explode like a hand grenade in a literature classroom accustomed to the likes of Macbeth or Great Expectations — works which exist at a safe remove from the lunchroom or the playground. If we lived in a world in which racism had been eliminated generations before, teaching Huck Finn would be a piece of cake. Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. The difficulties we have teaching this book reflect the difficulties we continue to confront in our classrooms and our nation. As educators, it is incumbent upon us to teach our students to decode irony, to understand history, and to be repulsed by racism and bigotry wherever they find it. But this is the task of a lifetime. It’s unfair to force one novel to bear the burden — alone — of addressing these issues and solving these problems. But Huck Finn — and you — can make a difference. Next: Film Index
Kid reviews for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I would review ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ as a 5-star book because it has an anti-slavery message, an amusing plot, and it is very moving. I think that ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is a good book, it follows ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and introduces American language to European readers. Like Charles Dickens, who makes the rich pay attention to the poor, Mark Twain explains what the bad things of slavery are to the white, and mocks the life of the rich, saying how it can be reformed by the homeless like Huck. The book plays a game of coincidence, like in Oliver Twist, where Oliver meets with his father’s friend, and meets his Aunts, as Huckleberry Finn meets with Tom Sawyer, his long-lost friend, on Phelps’s plantation, trying to free Jim, a black man, from the prison. At the beginning of the book, I didn’t like it much until Huck went to the circus, when I couldn’t stop laughing at the vivid description, making it seem as if I was there next to Huck, looking at the drunkard revealing himself as one of the circus clowns. I couldn’t stop crying when Huck had lost Jim, and I couldn’t see how he would ever come back to Tom Sawyer. It was funny, but also quite sad at the same time, when 2 men are introduced, one who claims to be the duke of Bridgewater, and one who claims to be the son of Louis 16th. I would recommend this book to children over 10, about 13, who have already read ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ as it will introduce them to the characters in a much more vivid way.
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