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A masterpiece.
T. S. Eliot
One of the world's great books and one of the central documents of American culture.
Lionel Trilling
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Ernest Hemingway
For the past forty years, black families have trekked to schools in numerous districts throughout the country to say, "This book is not good for our children," only to be turned away by insensitive and often unwittingly racist teachers and administrators who respond, "This book is a classic."
John H. Wallace
Huckleberry Finn may be the most exalted single work of American literature. Praised by our best known critics and writers, the novel is enshrined at the center of the American-literature curriculum. According to Arthur Applebee (1992, 28) the work is second only to Shakespeare in the frequency with which it appears in the classroom, required in seventy percent of public high schools and seventy-six percent of parochial high schools. The most taught novel, the most taught long work, and the most taught piece of American literature, Huckleberry Finn is a staple from junior high (where eleven chapters are included in the Junior Great Books program) to graduate school. Written in a now vanished dialect, told from the point of view of a runaway fourteen-year-old, the novel combines melodramatic boyhood adventure, farcical low comedy, and pointed social satire. Yet at its center is a relationship between a white boy and an escaped slave, an association freighted with the tragedy and the possibility of American history. Despite a social order set against interracial communication and respect, Huck develops a comradeship with Jim for which he is willing--against all he has been taught--to risk his soul.
HUCK FINN: CENSORSHIP AND SENSITIVITY
Despite the novel's sanctified place and overtly anti-racist message, since school desegregation in the 1950s, African Americans have raised objections to Huckleberry Finn and its effect on their children. Linking their complaints with the efforts of other groups to influence the curriculum, we English teachers have seen the issue as one of censorship, defending the novel and our right to teach it. In so doing we have been properly concerned: the freedom of professional classroom teachers to...