the banning of Huckleberry Finn
Created by shansen93 on Mar 27, 2011
Last updated: 04/10/11 at 10:16 PM
"You can't arbitrarily say this book is trouble, we're not going to teach it, because a book like Huckleberry Finn is part of American literature. You can't get around it."- David Bradley
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/aboutbook.html
"I need not tell you that I hated the book! Yet, while we read it, I pretended that it didn't bother me. I hid, from my teacher and my classmates, the tension, discomfort and hurt I would feel every time I heard that word or watched the class laugh at Jim. . . ."-Margo Allen, in an article titled "Huck Finn: Two Generations of Pain"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/aboutbook.html
"The reading aloud of Huck Finn in our classrooms is humiliating and insulting to black students. It contributes to their feelings of low self-esteem and to the white student's disrespect for black people. . . . 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 Wallace
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/aboutbook.html
Huckleberry Finn removed form the required reading list in Illinois high schools chiefly because of the n-word.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1984/4/1984_4_81.shtml
"I can still recall the anger I felt as my white classmates read aloud the word "nigger." In fact, as I write this letter I am getting angry all over again. I wanted to sink into my seat. Some of the whites snickered, others giggled. I can recall nothing of the literary merits of this work that you term "the greatest of all American novels." I only recall the sense of relief I felt when I would flip ahead a few pages and see that the word "nigger" would not be read that hour." -Allan B. Ballard
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~acareywe/huck.html
'A civil rights leader in Pasco, Washington, attacked Twain's use of "nigger" in 1967 two years later Miami Dade Junior College (Miami, Florida) excised the text from its required reading list after Negro students complained that it "embarrassed them"'
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~acareywe/huck.html
'A civil rights leader in Pasco, Washington, attacked Twain's use of "nigger" in 1967 two years later Miami Dade Junior College (Miami, Florida) excised the text from its required reading list after Negro students complained that it "embarrassed them"'
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~acareywe/huck.html
"In 1963, the Philadelphia Board of Education banned Huck Finn and replaced it with an edited one that "tone[d] down the violence, simplify[d] the Southern dialect, and delete[d] all derogatory references to Negroes."'
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~acareywe/huck.html
Kenneth Lynn produces a critical version of the book entitled "Huckleberry Finn: Text, Source, and Criticism." This starts a chain of production of "critical versions" of the book that include some or all of the following: the original text, original illustrations, and controversy over the ending, racism, and gender/sexuality.
(ex. - Graff and Phelan's edition)
http://www.twainweb.net/reviews/graff.html
The NAACP begin their campaign against the books use of "racial slurs" and "belittling racial designations".
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/aboutbook.html
"Of all the characters in Mark Twain's works there probably wasn't any of whom he was fonder than the one that went down the river with Huck Finn. It is true that this character is introduced as "Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim." That was the Missouri vernacular of the day. But from there on to the end of the story Miss Watson's Jim is a warm human being, lovable and admirable."-letter written to New York Times in reaction to New York City Board of Education's decision to ban Huck Finn in 1957
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~acareywe/huck.html
New York City Board of Education removes Huckleberry Finn from the list of approved books for elementary and junior high students.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1984/4/1984_4_81.shtml
T.S. Eliot writes an introduction for the Norton Critical Version of Huckleberry Finn that praises Mark Twain.
"It is Huck who gives the book style. The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.... Thus the River makes the book a great book... Mark Twain is a native, and the River God is his God."
http://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/a/huckfinn_writer.htm
Ernest Hemingway says, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/literature/huck.html
"Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west. His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas. There were mountains at the frontier but he wanted more than mountains to look at with his restive eyes--he wanted to find out about men and how they lived together. And because he turned back we have him forever."
http://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/a/huckfinn_writer.htm
"The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.... All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
("The Green Hills of Africa," 1934)
http://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/a/huckfinn_writer.htm
Many libraries introduce a "junior version" that omitted certain sections and simplified the language.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/aboutbook.html
"I believe that 'Huckleberry Finn' is one of the great masterpieces of the world...I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, and over and over again, long after every book written in America between the years 1800 and 1860...I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that, admitting all his defects, he wrote better English, in the sense of cleaner, straighter, vivider, saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne."
(review Review of Albert Bigelow Paine's biography of Mark Twain, in "The Smart Set")
http://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/a/huckfinn_writer.htm
"Yet its true greatness lies, not merely, or even chiefly, in its humor, but in its masterly reproduction of the scenery and atmosphere of the great rivers, in its wonderfully skilful mingling of tragedy, comedy and farce, and above all, in the character of Huckleberry Finn himself, and his relations with... Jim"
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/valerev.html#b
Huckleberry Finn banned from Brooklyn Public Library.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1842832_1842838_1844945,00.html
"Denver and Omaha public libraries exclude Huck for fear that the 'immoral and sacrilegious' book would 'put wrong ideas in youngsters’ heads.' "
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1984/4/1984_4_81.shtml
”An American critic once neatly declared that the late G. P. R. James hit the bull's-eye of success with his first shot, and that for ever thereafter he went on firing through the same hole. Now this is just what Mark Twain has not done.”
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/satrev.html
"Were Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist less well founded and established, we might say that this cheap and pernicious stuff is conclusive evidence that its author has no claim to be ranked with Artemus Ward, Sydney Smith, Dean Swift, John Hay, or any other recognized humorist above the grade of the author of that outrageous fiction..."
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/nyworld.html
Huckleberry Finn is banned from the Concord Library in Massachusetts.
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/nyherald.html
The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts immediately bans the book on the grounds of:
"It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality; it is couched in the language of a rough dialect, and all through its pages there is a systemic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, coarse, inelegant expressions. It is also very irreverent. . . . The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/aboutbook.html
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is published in England and Canada.
"For some time past Mr. Clemens has been carried away by the ambition of seriousness and fine writing. In Huckleberry Finn he returns to his right mind, and is again the Mark Twain of old time."
Update Sources