Huck Finn - Off the required reading list?

The (Raliegh) News-Observer reports:

Ken Gilbert read the story of Huckleberry Finn in the late 1960s in a segregated black North Carolina school, but he doesn't remember much about Huck's adventures and the book's status as an American classic.

What he does remember is class discussions of a racial slur. Mark Twain used it over and over. "We never got to the story line," he said. "It was the racial issue."

When his daughter Nia was assigned to read it in 10th grade, his memories of a racially volatile childhood came surging back.

Now Gilbert is reviving a century-old debate by asking St. Louis Park High to remove the novel from the required-reading list.

He does not seek to ban the book from the school. "I don't care if all of America reads the book," he said, but he doesn't want it to be required reading.

I happen to be one of those guys who believes Huckleberry Finn to be the great American novel. It provides a picture of the nation at a critical juncture, when America was just becoming a force in the world. Mark Twain's insightful treatment of the dignity of man, in the face of overt state-supported racism was edifying to me - a priviledged white man growing up on the Ohio River a century later.

Twain's treatment is humorous but also realistic including the dialect and words used by common folk at the time. And there's the rub. The common folk were ignorant. The common folk believed other men to be property. The common folk were politically incorrect, to a grave fault.

In the book's most compelling passage, Huck is forced to battle with his conscience. The issue was whether to "turn in" Jim, a runaway slave who was also Huck's friend. But as fate (or is it fiction) would have it, Huck never could "behave," and he swallowed his shame for being a low-down abolitionist, and covered for Jim. During the exchange, the n-word was used.

In another time and in another place, I would read that passage aloud to my class substituting the word "slaves" (socially acceptable perhaps, but hardly an improvement) for the offending label. I loved to listen to my students work out for themselves what was truly right and what was morally wrong, and I regret that students might be led away from that experience.

On the other hand - I don't really understand what it means to be oppressed for my race. If I did, I'd like to think I would fight back and try to strike down the language and symbols of my oppressors.


As Huckleberry Finn might say, I'm stuck.


A new edition, the only authoritative text based on the complete original manuscript, was published in 2001. It is the product of painstaking research by the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library that began shortly after the manuscript's first half was uncovered in a Hollywood attic in1990.


The book is considered Twain's best work, as well as a compelling commentary of American race relations, class and violence that is as provocative today as when published in 1885. The book's popularity continues, as witnessed by the more than 100 editions of the book in more than 53 languages and its presence not only in books around the world but on CD, audiotape and e-book.