"People have been calling Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” a great American novel for more than a century. Ernest Hemingway said that this story of a young white boy and an enslaved Black man floating on a raft down the Mississippi River was the very root of all American literature. “There was nothing before,” he wrote. “There has been nothing as good since.”
Sam Sifton - NY Time - 24 August 2026
"Did you read “Huck Finn” when you were young? I did, a long time ago at a fancy prep school in New York City, and if there were any discussions of the racial slur that shows up in it more than 200 times, I don’t recall them. The book was cast as satire, an important commentary on the horror of slavery, a meditation on compassion and irony. It sure was uncomfortable, though, when the teacher had us read passages from the book aloud.
Beware!
In 2026, many students are upset by the slurs, and many educators are wary of a book that uses them and that could lead to job-endangering conversations, so they simply don’t assign it. For The New York Times Magazine today, the literary critic Ruth Franklin asks how — or whether — the novel should still be taught. She quotes a Twain scholar who compares “Huck Finn” to fugu, a Japanese fish so potentially poisonous that sushi chefs must acquire a license to serve it. “If it’s prepared right, it’s phenomenal,” the scholar said. “If it’s taught wrong, it can be toxic.”
So what might it mean, Franklin asks, for “Huck Finn” to be prepared right?
Her answer, in part:
Over the past few years, I’ve been speaking to teachers and students who believe that “Huck Finn” still has a necessary place in the classroom, because it is uniquely able both to convey the structures of racism embedded in American society and to model how prejudice can be overcome. The book provides its own master class in critical thinking; as Toni Morrison wrote in an admiring introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition, “The brilliance of ‘Huck Finn’ is that it is the argument it raises.”
That word, though! “No student wants to hear it,” one college professor told Franklin. “It’s a form of violence.”
And hear it they do. Franklin spent some time in a private school in Washington, D.C., where Samantha Goodwin, a white teacher, brought up Huck’s derogatory language about Black people in one of her classes:
I could see the discomfort on some students’ faces. Finally, a white student responded. “It’s supposed to anger you,” he said. “You feel like Huck has been taught that Black people aren’t human.”
“You’re speaking nicely to the power of Huck as narrator,” Goodwin responded. “He doesn’t have the ability to take the next step and say: ‘Wait a second. Why did I believe that?’ But we get angry.”
Which is fugu, I guess, prepared correctly: experiencing the novel emotionally while also appraising its critique of racism, and how that critique might fall short today. It matters when novels get us angry — and when they make us think.
Yes, but …
Franklin worries that such an approach isn’t really scalable, at least outside elite schools. “It’s easy to see how the social dynamics could spin out of control in a classroom led by a teacher with less experience or skill or fewer resources,” she writes.
Moreover, it’s not as if all students will come around to understanding the value of the novel anyway. At the end of every school year, Goodwin, the Washington teacher, asks her students in an anonymous survey whether the novel should continue to be taught. Some say no. “It’s just racist,” one of them responded.
In 2011, one publisher printed an edition of the novel that omitted the slur. Black and white academics debated its merit for The Times’s opinion pages that year. Paul Butler, a Black law professor, recalled suffering through “Huck Finn” in high school and listening to his teacher’s tortured explanations of how the slur didn’t really mean the slur, “or meant it ironically, or historically, or symbolically,” he wrote. “Whatever. I could live my whole life fine if I never read that book again.”
It’s One of Our Greatest and Most ControversialNovels. How Should It Be Taught?
Ruth Franklin - NY Times - 24 August 2026
"A few years ago, I created a seminar for my students at Columbia University, where I teach writing, about the challenges of separating a novel’s literary value from its politics. There were 10 books on the syllabus, including “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Even though I hadn’t read the novel since I was a child, I knew it had to be part of this course. For more than a century, Mark Twain’s saga of a young white boy and an enslaved Black man traveling on a raft down the Mississippi River has been a fixture of the American canon. Narrated in Huck’s cheeky, irrepressible voice, it pioneered the writing of literary fiction in the vernacular while mercilessly skewering the racism and hypocrisy of white Southerners in the pre-Civil War era. Influential critics from T.S. Eliot to Ralph Ellison enshrined it as essential — not just a great book but, in the words of Lionel Trilling, “one of the central documents of American culture.” By the end of the 1940s, it had become a mainstay of anthologies and survey classes.
But over the past few decades, this once-standard text has come to occupy a slippery position in the classroom. Some perceive it as an essential commentary on slavery’s depredations, while others feel it endangers Black students — mainly because the racist slur known euphemistically as the N-word appears more than 200 times. A son of slave owners who married into a prominent abolitionist family, Twain almost certainly intended the novel as an indictment of racial prejudice and used the word to illustrate the racism of his characters, not to endorse it. Though Huck, indoctrinated in the conventional morality of his time, initially believes it’s wrong to help an enslaved person escape, he comes to feel loyalty and love for Jim, his companion. The tension animating the story is not just whether the two of them can outwit the villains who want to capture Jim, but also whether Huck will reject his prior conception of right and wrong.
Still, many readers understandably feel that the novel’s constant, even obsessive repetition of the slur reinforces the system of white supremacy that it purports to critique. In the classroom, where teachers often read aloud or call on their students to do so, the problem is obvious. Even when the word isn’t spoken, its silently menacing presence on the page is impossible to ignore.
I could see this as soon as I opened the book. I was reading a used copy whose previous owner must have been a student. This person started out diligently highlighting and taking notes. But they clearly found the slur upsetting. “OMG stop using it,” they wrote in the margin at one point. Eventually, the highlights and notes petered out.
I gulped down the novel in two sittings, disoriented and amazed. It felt genuinely shocking to be confronted by the slur so brazenly. But I was beguiled by Huck’s plain-spoken voice and by the way Twain uses it to point to the gap between the character’s limited understanding of the world and what is really taking place in the novel, which we must work out on our own. “It shows how a body can see and don’t see, at the same time,” Huck says at one point when he’s failed to notice something — a line that could be the novel’s motto. I was startled, too, to find that Twain relies on Jim as the novel’s moral fulcrum, often leaving space in the narrative for a richer and more multilayered reading of the character than is commonly thought. Despite all its problems, the book felt fresh and relevant. Reading it, I wished Twain were alive and writing today, if only to know what he would make of our current president.
Since 2000, “Huck Finn” has been challenged or banned by school districts in at least 12 states, usually because it is perceived as racist. At the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn., the book sits front and center on a shelf of banned books displayed in a literal cage. But educators tell me the book is less likely to be formally removed from curriculums than simply put aside by overworked teachers who have neither the classroom time nor the intellectual energy to handle a text widely seen as radioactive — and who fear that a misstep could cost them their jobs. “They haven’t banned it,” says John Conway, a retired public school teacher in Alabama. “They just don’t want to have the discussions about it.”
A majority of book challenges today come from right-wing activists, organizations and government officials who object to what they see as progressive political content, particularly regarding race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Precisely because it deals with the history of enslavement, “Huck Finn,” too, is now vulnerable to such challenges. Early in his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which directs schools to promote “patriotic education,” defined as “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.” This executive order explicitly prohibits what it calls “discriminatory equity ideology,” a term that seems to cover just about any discussion of systemic racism — the novel’s central engine.
In this climate, it’s easy to see why “Huck Finn” is “dying a quiet death,” as one teacher tells me. Owing to a combination of factors — the early introduction of technology in the classroom, pandemic learning losses and now the growing use of A.I. — students are reading more reluctantly than ever before. Where teachers once assigned multiple novels per year, they are now likely to cover only one or two. At the same time, novels by Black writers that deal with racism, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” have become staples of the curriculum.
The Twain scholar and Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin compares “Huck Finn” to fugu, a Japanese delicacy so poisonous that a chef must be specially licensed to serve it. “If it’s prepared right, it’s phenomenal,” she says. “If it’s taught wrong, it can be toxic.” What might it mean for the book to be “prepared right”?
Over the past few years, I’ve been speaking to teachers and students who believe that “Huck Finn” still has a necessary place in the classroom, because it is uniquely able both to convey the structures of racism embedded in American society and to model how prejudice can be overcome. The book provides its own master class in critical thinking; as Toni Morrison wrote in an admiring introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition, “The brilliance of ‘Huck Finn’ is that it is the argument it raises.” Watching teachers and their students grapple with it, and grappling with it myself, I came to feel that the book remains vital. Huck’s journey to political and ethical independence serves as a powerful testament to the importance of questioning authority and trusting oneself, a primary American principle that remains at least as urgent now as it was in Twain’s time. As one teacher told me, “It’s about the country’s search for a soul.”
Anyone who wants to teach “Huck Finn” must figure out how to handle the slur, which first appears in Chapter 1. Huck, whose father is the town drunk, has grown up enviably free from parental interference, sleeping outdoors and rarely going to school. When the story begins, he has been quasi-adopted by the Widow Douglas, who is trying to “sivilize” him (Huck’s term). After she delivers a lecture about how to get into heaven, Huck describes their nighttime routine: “By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed.”
The word was still part of common colloquial language at the time of the story — the novel, published in 1884, is set “forty to fifty years ago” — but it was understood to be offensive. Twain grew up hearing it all around him but is said to have no longer used it when writing in his own voice by the time he was writing the novel. His use of it in characters’ speech is at once a realistic portrayal of how some Southerners would have talked and a literary device highlighting the degradation of a society that believed itself to be “sivilized” while persisting in stunningly barbaric behavior. It’s no accident that he often puts it in the mouth of a character espousing religion, one of the main targets of the book’s satire. “Twain did not set out in that book to write a story about an epithet,” says Joseph Csicsila, a white professor in Michigan. “The epithet figures in that book as a function of character revelation.”
This intellectual explanation doesn’t mitigate students’ distress when encountering the word. “Reading ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was like seeing a Confederate statue,” Randall Dottin, a documentary filmmaker who is Black, tells me of his experience with the book in high school several decades ago. “No student wants to hear it,” says Ryan Heryford, a college professor in California, who still remembers his own discomfort as a white student asked to read aloud from the book. “It’s a form of violence.” Rohan Pai, an Indian American student who read the book in high school, concurs: “It was obviously a little tense when someone would get to that word.”
In the early 2000s, Alan Gribben, a white professor of English who died in May, noticed that his Black students tended to be absent when he taught the novel. Hoping to “retain a great work and take some of the pain out of it,” he decided to create a new edition that replaced the slur with “slave.” He brought his manuscript to NewSouth Books, then an independent publisher in Montgomery, Ala. (It is now part of the University of Georgia Press.)
When the NewSouth edition of “Huck Finn” was first announced in 2011, it was pilloried. Twain scholars accused Gribben of censoring the work of an American icon, while editorialists attacked his work as political correctness gone wild. In an op-ed, the Twain biographer Ron Powers charged him with the “evisceration” of a classic. Fishkin, the Stanford scholar, was more measured but equally disapproving, arguing that Gribben’s edits neutered the book: “To expose a racist society for what it is, you have to show racists as they are, speaking as they would speak,” she wrote.
Fifteen years later, the tide has shifted. No teacher I’ve met speaks the slur aloud in the classroom or allows students to do so. Instead, they substitute “N-word” or a nonverbal sound like “mm.”
“Knowing that such a thing existed, it felt derelict to me to choose any other version” than the NewSouth edition, says Peter Mergenthaler, an English teacher in Washington, D.C., who is white. To have the word on the page “for kids to see, to read independently and either to misunderstand contextually or be grievously hurt by it — I don’t know that even with dozens of years of experience I would choose the uncensored version,” he adds. Maya Dunkley, one of his students, agrees with this approach. “You don’t have to read racism to learn about racism and learn that it’s wrong,” Maya, who identifies as biracial, tells me.
But most of the teachers I spoke to felt that Gribben’s effort, while well-intentioned, was misguided. The educator and scholar Jocelyn A. Chadwick, who is Black and has written extensively about pedagogy as well as about Twain and race, argues that it’s better for an inexperienced teacher not to teach the novel at all than to use the NewSouth edition. The slur, she says, is essential to the book. “It’s not a hip-hop word, it’s not a slang word, it’s a word that’s so filled with blood and agony and hatred,” she says, adding: “It’s supposed to hurt.” Eyob Sisay, a Black student from Washington, D.C., agrees. “Just knowing how jarring it is, and how casually and frequently it’s used in the story, I think it’s important for us to have that perspective,” he says.
Samantha Goodwin, who taught Eyob at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, spends several class periods contextualizing the slur, using the work of the linguist Geneva Smitherman and the historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. I sat in on one of her classes as she walked her students through the difference between milder Horatian satire, which is meant to be funny, and Juvenalian satire, the harshest form of the device, which Twain uses for his sharpest critiques. “It’s not meant to make you feel good,” she told me. It’s meant to make the reader uncomfortable — and angry.
Twain’s use of the word is part of his assault on the hypocritical mores of supposedly genteel Southern society. People Huck and Jim encounter over the course of the novel — many of whom Huck believes he should respect as “quality” — participate in a blood feud that results in the deaths of multiple people, including children; try to swindle three grieving sisters out of their inheritance; and speak of Black people as less than human. “If you read it without understanding that it’s satire, your anger will be directed at the author,” Goodwin cautioned. This is exactly what often happens when students first encounter “Huck Finn.”
As the students debated where various scenes in the novel fall on the satirical spectrum, Goodwin, who is white, brought up Huck’s demeaning language about Black people. There was a pause in which I could see the discomfort on some students’ faces. Finally, a white student responded. “It’s supposed to anger you,” he said. “You feel like Huck has been taught that Black people aren’t human.”
“You’re speaking nicely to the power of Huck as narrator,” Goodwin responded. “He doesn’t have the ability to take the next step and say: ‘Wait a second. Why did I believe that?’ But we get angry.”
In a pedagogical culture that tends to shy away from unpleasantness, Goodwin’s approach felt like an honest — and valuable — way of dealing with one of the ugliest aspects of American literary history. Reading “Huck Finn” isn’t just an intellectual experience; it’s also an emotional journey. If the book produces strong feelings in its readers, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.
Still, I left Goodwin’s classroom wondering whether her strategy was replicable on a larger scale. She teaches in an elite private school where around 40 percent of students are white, and she is able to design her own curriculum. It’s easy to see how the social dynamics could spin out of control in a classroom led by a teacher with less experience or skill or fewer resources. She thinks her own children, who are biracial, should wait until at least the age of 14 to read the novel.
And even Goodwin can’t persuade all her students of the book’s value. At the end of every school year, when she asks them — anonymously — whether it should still be taught, some say no: “It’s just racist.”
In addition to the slur, Twain’s characterization of Jim is another reason some readers perceive “Huck Finn” as racist. The character speaks in heavy dialect that sounds similar to portrayals of Black people in minstrel shows. Sometimes he seems to function as a foil to Huck, expressing confusion over simple facts or misunderstanding well-known stories, such as the parable of King Solomon and the baby. In one classroom I visited, students debated whether he was intended to serve as comic relief.
It sometimes seems that way. In Chapter 2, Huck and Tom Sawyer are trying to sneak out of the widow’s house. Huck stumbles and attracts the attention of Jim, who goes outside and stops just at the spot where the boys are hiding. “Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n … I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin,” he says, apparently to himself. Positioning himself nearly on top of the boys, he falls asleep, allowing them to escape.
Percival Everett’s 2024 novel “James,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, loosely retells the story of “Huck Finn” from Jim’s perspective. Everett’s version of the character sometimes seems tailor-made to compensate for the apparent flaws in Twain’s depiction. Not only has he secretly taught himself to read and write, but he holds erudite fantasy conversations with Enlightenment philosophers. When he uses dialect, it’s a canny survival strategy, giving white people a version of Black people they can feel superior to. “More than a correction, it’s a rescue mission,” Sam Sacks wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
But in the gap between Huck’s narration and what is actually going on, Twain allows the reader to enter into Jim’s perspective — and to notice how other characters do not. Robert Paul Lamb, author of the forthcoming “Huck and Jim’s America: Slavery, Race and Realism in Mark Twain’s World,” speculates that Jim’s performative language in the first scene suggests he’s only pretending to be asleep in order to amuse the boys — which is also the way Everett rewrites the episode. In “Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade,” published last year, Fishkin argues that Jim’s actions demonstrate he is more intelligent and resourceful than Huck appreciates. “Start with the assumption that Jim is smart,” she tells her students. “Once that seed is planted, they begin to recognize Huck’s blind spots.” A body can see and don’t see, at the same time.
A first-person narrative, by definition, is limited to the point of view of the person who is telling the story. The fact that the novel is narrated in Huck’s exceedingly unreliable voice means Twain can’t give us Jim’s point of view on anything. But when things happen that Huck has no words to express — because they are beyond his comprehension or involve a leap of empathy that he can’t yet make — Twain indicates that by leaving him silent. Toni Morrison described these moments as “when scenes and incidents swell the heart unbearably precisely because unarticulated, and force an act of imagination almost against the will.”
Morrison may have been thinking of the end of Chapter 23, one of the book’s most poignant episodes. One morning Huck finds Jim weeping with longing for his wife and children. At the time, defenders of slavery often justified separating families by saying that Black people’s family ties were not as strong as white people’s. It suddenly strikes Huck that this is a lie. “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for theirn,” he muses. It’s a shocking line — and a moment when we might need to remind ourselves that Twain is representing such ideas rather than endorsing them. Much of the novel’s extraordinary energy comes from the tension between Huck’s dawning sense of morality and the inadequacy of his language to convey it.
Then Jim tells a wrenching story. One day, shortly after his daughter recovered from scarlet fever, she ignored an order that he gave her, and he struck her hard across the face in rage. A few minutes later, when she failed to react to a loud noise, he realized the disease had left her deaf. He castigated himself for treating his child — a child he may never see again — so harshly and unfairly. “O de po’ little thing! de Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live!” Jim recalls saying. “O, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb — en I’d ben a treat’n her so!”
The chapter ends there, without comment from Huck. Just Jim’s words, with all their pain, for the reader to endure.
“If you were to say to Mark Twain today, ‘You were a racist,’ he probably would agree with you,” John Pascal told a class of 11th graders at Seton Hall Preparatory School, an all-boys Catholic high school in New Jersey. Before Pascal’s students even opened “Huck Finn,” he walked them through Twain’s life story, focusing on the writer’s about-face with regard to slavery and the close relations he had with Black people, including Frederick Douglass. Pascal, who is white, especially likes to tell the story of Warner T. McGuinn, a Black student at Yale Law School whose tuition Twain paid — a gesture many see as an attempt at reparations for slavery. “People who say ‘Huck Finn’ is racist, and Mark Twain is racist, don’t know this fact,” Pascal told his students.
On this spring morning, they were working through Chapter 15, one of the thorniest passages. Huck and Jim have been looking for the point where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers converge. They plan to stop there and find a steamboat to take them up into the free states. The river is enveloped in fog and full of debris, and when Huck paddles ahead in a canoe to look for a place to anchor the raft, he can’t find his way back. When he finally returns the next morning, Jim is overjoyed to see him. But Huck, who can rarely resist playing a mean trick, tries to convince Jim that he dreamed the entire episode.
The students were at first too focused on decoding Jim’s speech to appreciate the emotional dynamics. “Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead — you ain’ drownded — you’s back agin?” one of the boys read haltingly as others snickered.
Jim finally concedes and even offers an interpretation of the supposed dream, but Huck can’t stop there. “What does thesethings stand for?” he asks, pointing to the leaves and branches that accumulated on the raft during the stormy night.
Now Jim understands that Huck was fooling him. “When I got all wore out, wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’,” he tells Huck. “En all you wuz thinkin’ ’bout, wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.”
This speech constitutes the most important education Huck receives from anyone in the entire novel. At a time when in some states Black people could be whipped simply for speaking rudely to white people, this was revolutionary. “There’s no other instance I can think of of a Black person correcting a white person in 19th-century American literature,” Fishkin says.
Jim leaves Huck alone to think about what he’s done. Soon Huck does a remarkable thing for a white person of his era: He apologizes to Jim. “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger — but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither,” he says. “I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.”
Once again, Twain’s irony sits in the space between Huck’s primitive language and his dawning racial consciousness. The phrase he uses, “humble myself to a nigger,” is grotesque. But he’s moving toward the understanding that Black people are equal to white people in every way, including in their emotional lives — a point that was not at all taken for granted at the time of the novel.
“Now, why did it take him 15 minutes?” Pascal asked his class.
“Because that’s just not something he would normally have to do, to apologize to — to — a slave,” said a student in the front row, highlighting the passage.
“The institution of slavery is so strong it takes him 15 minutes to walk through it and do the right thing and just apologize.” He paused. “Is he ashamed for apologizing?”
“No,” the boys chorused.
“‘I wasn’t sorry.’ How come we don’t get the actual words of apology?”
“It’s not needed,” another student said.
Pascal, who had been pacing among the boys, paused again. “Twain’s emphasis is on showing that Jim has a voice and that that voice is as human as a white person’s,” he bellowed. “For Huck to say anything, if Huck gives the words and we read it, it takes away from the power of what Jim said.”
Allowing Jim’s speech to stand without comment also lets Twain avoid sentimentalizing him, as a writer more given to using characters as mouthpieces for his own opinions might run the risk of doing. Rohan Pai, one of Pascal’s students, later told me that his class was amazed to realize that the book’s “one good character” is Jim. If Twain has hidden Jim’s agency and humanity beneath the stereotypes of his time, he’s challenging the reader to unearth the character’s true depth rather than succumb to the racism the novel condemns.
In the book’s emotional climax, Huck discovers that two con men with whom he and Jim have become embroiled sold Jim to a farmer for $40. Over two pages, Twain walks us through Huck’s dilemma. According to what he’s always been told, the “right thing” is to write to Miss Watson, Jim’s enslaver, and tell her where he is. But he can’t make himself do it. He thinks about how Jim “said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.” Though Huck believes that he’s acting against God’s wishes, he takes a stand for what he feels is right. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he announces, tearing up the letter he’s been trying to write.
We might say that Huck shouldn’t be congratulated for doing the only compassionate thing. “It may have functioned as a book against racism in its own time, but it doesn’t have the same effect now,” says Maya Dunkley, the student who read the NewSouth edition. Others argue that Huck’s journey as a white character is relevant only to white people. “I don’t think ‘Huck Finn’ is a novel for young Black kids,” says Randall Dottin, the Black filmmaker. “It’s really for white folks to enter into these stories and hash it out.”
Some students of color I spoke to, though, find that Huck’s dilemma speaks to their experience. Geethika Pochana, an Indian American student who read the novel in Conway’s class, compared the racial dynamics of the book to anti-Muslim prejudice among Hindus. Conway, who is white, said a Korean student in his class drew an analogy with Japanese oppression of Koreans. “That’s exactly what you need to take away,” he said. “You need to make it real.”
The more I think about “Huck Finn,” though, the more I wonder whether treating it as “a book against racism” is unnecessarily limiting. Its larger theme transcends race: the need for each person, thinking and acting as an individual, to determine their own moral code.
If the novel remains inspiring, it’s not because Huck comes to understand that Black people are equal to white people. It’s because he offers a step-by-step guide to challenging the status quo, demonstrating how someone steeped in the prejudice of his time learns to assert his own understanding of right and wrong.
Huck will soon be faced with a new dilemma — one with which teenagers especially can empathize. When Huck finally finds the farm to which Jim was sold, the owners turn out to be Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas — and then Tom himself shows up to visit. He tells Huck that Miss Watson died and set Jim free in her will. But before telling Jim — or his aunt and uncle — Tom subjects Jim to a cruelly drawn-out charade of imprisonment, with little opposition from Huck. As Erin Bartram, the associate director for education at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, notes, it’s one thing “to have discovered that everything you believed was wrong and that the world you live in wants you to keep holding on to that fiction in order to fit in,” and another to stick to your new principles “when your cool friend comes around.”
Critics have always hated this ending. Hemingway, who wrote that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn,’” encouraged readers to quit before the final chapters, because “the rest is just cheating.” In an influential essay published in 1953, the critic Leo Marx argued that the ending is an artistic and ethical failure that substitutes cheap entertainment for the novel’s moral heart. Maya puts it more succinctly: The episode “has a lot of white savior vibes.”
Reading politically, some see the ending as a metaphor for the failures of the post-Reconstruction era, which were at the forefront of Twain’s mind in the early 1880s, after his first visit back to the South since the Civil War. “It’s written out of anger,” says Stephen Harris, a teacher in Brooklyn. “He was mad at what he saw in the South. Mad at what he saw his people having done to Black people.”
Even so, it’s excruciating to watch Huck go along with Tom’s heartless plan, knowing how Jim must be suffering. Huck tells us that “Jim he couldn’t see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him.” Of course, there is a stinging irony in this: Jim has no choice but to agree. The reader really does know better, though, and feels sorrow and rage on Jim’s behalf. Perhaps this is Twain’s intention. Remember Chadwick’s words: “It’s supposed to hurt.”
Twain saves some of his subtlest — and thus most devastating — satire for Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas, whom Huck sees as kindly white folks but who are capable of thoughtless brutality toward their slaves. One small example: the presence on the farm of a “yaller girl.” The word “yaller,” or “yellow,” referred to biracial people. Is this the novel’s way of telling us that Uncle Silas, so kind and affectionate to Tom and Huck, rapes his slaves? It’s another example of Morrison’s idea that Twain forces us to experience “an act of imagination almost against the will.”
At the end of the book, Tom suggests that all three of them go off and have new adventures. Huck agrees, but once again, the text is silent where Jim might respond. We know that he wants only to find his wife and children. Perhaps Twain means for us to feel the absence of resolution. The failure to bring this paradigmatic story of race relations to a satisfying conclusion may be the only ending possible. “America has never been able to write a better ending,” the writer David Bradley, who is Black, has said. “America has never been able to write any ending at all.”
In 1989, “Huck Finn” ranked No. 3 in a national study of the most frequently taught works in American high schools. The current data isn’t as comprehensive, but in a study conducted recently by the National Council of Teachers of English, only 77 of around 4,000 teachers listed it as a book they often used. The teachers I spoke to are certain the trend is moving downward. Many of them are the last of their colleagues still teaching the book.
Twain understood as well as anyone that literary trends change. If “Huck Finn” was once perceived as the quintessential work of American literature, we now have a greater appreciation of the importance of multiple stories and perspectives. Many of the teachers I encountered pair the novel with slave narratives or other texts by Black writers. Chadwick argues that without Twain as their predecessor, contemporary Black writers could not write about slavery the way they do. “It all starts with Twain,” she says.
But that doesn’t mean we are finished learning from him. “Huck Finn” draws one of the most memorable and sympathetic Black characters in 19th-century American fiction and makes its readers feel that character’s pain. It brings us inside the confusion of a boy who discovers not only that he’s been lied to all his life, but also how hard it is to stand up for his new beliefs under social pressure. And it forces readers to work hard to understand that we’re getting a limited picture — and sometimes an entirely misleading one — of what’s actually taking place.
The disappearance of “Huck Finn” is a worrisome sign that wrestling with a difficult book and emerging with one’s thoughts invigorated is no longer a given in the high school classroom. If students are no longer learning to value the skills of literary interpretation and critical thinking, Twain’s most important novel may eventually fulfill his own ironic definition of a classic: “a book which people praise but don’t read.” As a nation, we will be poorer for its absence. “It’s a tough book,” Chadwick says. “But it’s a book about us.”
Ruth Franklin is a literary critic and biographer. Her most recent book is “The Many Lives of Anne Frank.”
