Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain This past Friday was the 125 anniversary of Huckleberry Finn, a book that packed a wallop when it came out in 1885 and has continued to be controversial ever since. Last May I wrote a series of posts on Huckleberry Finn, including on its importance to me as a child […]
Tag Archives: Mark Twain
“My Habits . . . Would Assassinate You”
As a change of pace, I turn today’s column over to my very good friend and department chair, Mark Twain expert Ben Click. Ben is a 6’6″ Texan who is the funniest man I know and a kind of Mark Twain figure himself. His courses on the man who called himself “the American” have […]
Empowering Conversations about Race
As I look back over this past week of entries, what conclusions can I draw? First, that literature can serve the cause of race relations in this country. The friendship between Huck and Jim spurred my dreams of black-white friendship when I was a child being raised in segregated schools in the south, and it […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged black anger, censorship, Huckleberry Finn, race relations, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, white fantasies Comments closed
When I Defended Song of Solomon
I think it was 13 years ago or so when I read in our county newspaper that a high school student was objecting to a book he had been assigned to read in an Advanced Placement English class. The book was Toni’s Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning Song of Solomon, a book on the Advanced Placement list, and […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged censorship, Huckleberry Finn, power of literature, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison Comments closed
Should Huck Finn Be Banned?
How much impact can images from a book like Huckleberry Finn have upon a reader? I’ve written about the importance of Huck’s courageous stand upon me as a young child, so I would answer, “ a tremendous impact.” But could there also be a negative impact? Could the docile and comic Jim undermine the self […]
Can Huckleberry Finn Damage Readers?
Yesterday I mentioned that Huckleberry Finn has been banned in some schools, perhaps because of Huck’s liberal use of the “n” word. Now Twain, of course, doesn’t use that language because he himself is racist but because he wants to capture Huck’s “white trash” ignorance, which Huck then magnificently transcends. But the argument has gone […]
Huck and My Desegregation Battles
Here’s a personal story of how a literary classic came to my aid at a critical time in my life. When I was in sixth grade in Sewanee, Tennessee (the year was 1962), I was a plaintiff in a civil rights case. School systems all over the south were defying the Brown vs. Board of […]
