Huck and the nadir: Black writers reading Mark Twain in the Gilded Age

Abstract

Was Huck Black? The provocative question that serves as the title of Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s seminal study (1993) remains at the center of debates regarding Twain’s legacy. Did Twain appreciate Black culture or simply appropriate it? Do his written works successfully critique white supremacist worldviews and racist stereotypes or merely replicate them? To wit, should we continue to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the classroom? Despite the endorsements of such literary tastemakers as T.S. Eliot, who declared Huck Finn a “masterpiece,” and Lionel Trilling, who deemed it “one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture,” many have resisted canonizing Faulkner’s “father of American literature” (Eliot 1950, vii; Trilling 1948, vi; Faulkner qtd. in Jelliffe 1956, 88). In 1982, John H. Wallace, an administrator at Mark Twain Intermediate School in Alexandria, Virginia, circulated a petition to remove Huck Finn from the curriculum, calling the book “racist trash.” Wallace described the experience of reading and discussing Huck Finn as “humiliating and insulting” for Black students, noting that