Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one of the first novels ever written in the vernacular, or common speech, being told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books). The book was published for the first time on February 18, 1885. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is also a great example of a bildungsroman.

Controversy

Although the Concord, Massachusetts library banned the book shortly after its publication because of its "tawdry subject manner" and "the coarse, ignorant language in which it was narrated," the San Francisco Chronicle came quickly to its defense on March 29, 1885:

Related Topics:
Concord, Massachusetts - Banned the book - San Francisco Chronicle - March 29 - 1885

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:"Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave. Huckleberry Finn, the son of a worthless, drunken, poor white, is troubled with many qualms of conscience because of the part he is taking in helping the negro to gain his freedom. This has been called exaggerated by some critics, but there is nothing truer in the book." http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/sfchron2.html

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In the United States, occasional efforts have been made to restrict the reading of the book. At various times, it has been:

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• banned from the library in Concord, Massachusetts, shortly after publication
• excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library and other libraries
• removed from reading lists due to alleged racism (e.g., in March of 1995 it was removed from the reading list of 10th grade English classes at National Cathedral School in Washington, DC, according to the Washington Post; a New Haven, Connecticut correspondent to Banned Books Online reports it has been removed from a public school program there as well.)
• removed from school programs at the behest of groups maintaining that its frequent use of the word nigger implies that the book as a whole is racist, despite what defenders maintain is the overwhelmingly anti-racist plot of the book, its satirical nature, and the anachronism of applying current definitions of polite speech to past times.

The American Library Association ranked Huckleberry Finn the fifth most frequently challenged (in the sense of attempting to ban) book in the United States during the 1990s.

Related Topics:
American Library Association - 1990s

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A character in the 1969 Nero Wolfe

Related Topics:
1969 - Nero Wolfe

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novel Death of a Dude by Rex Stout opines that "All right,

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then, I'll go to hell," Huck's pronouncement on his own fate for

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his decision to help Jim escape, is the single greatest sentence

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in American literature. While that is rather a large claim, many

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critics would likely agree that this is one of the great

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lines in American literature.

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