The Harm In Banning ‘Huck Finn’
Why everyone loses when Mark Twain’s novel vanishes from bookshelves
In The Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway said that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” That’s debatable given how small a role women play in Twain’s novel compared with how large a role they play in modern American literature.
But generations of critics have agreed with Hemingway’s broader point: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn marks the beginning of a distinctly American literature, one that reflects the nation’s speech as well its besetting sin: its racial injustices. If the critics were right, we may be nearing the end of that “beginning.”
Huckleberry Finn has been one of the novels most frequently challenged at schools and libraries, often for reasons that seem absurd in retrospect, since its publication in 1885. Early critics targeted language seen as “coarse” by Victorian standards: In 1905 the Brooklyn Public Library banned the book for its use of “sweat” instead of perspiration. As scholars have noted, librarians and others faulted Twain for the sin of daring to use the language of his day.
Recent assaults on the novel have focused on its use of the N-word, and it’s easy to see why. Some authors put the racial slur only into the mouths of obvious bigots, using it to reveal…
