Huckleberry Finn Published: Twain's American Classic

The Concord Public Library banned it immediately. Too coarse. Bad grammar. The main character was a dirty, uneducated boy who helped a runaway slave and thought he was going to hell for doing it. Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the United States on February 18, 1885, and the book has not stopped generating controversy, acclaim, and argument for a century and a half. Ernest Hemingway would later say that all modern American literature comes from this one novel. Twain had started writing Huck Finn in 1876 as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but the material resisted the lighthearted tone. He put the manuscript aside for years, returning to it in bursts between 1879 and 1883. The resulting book was something entirely new in American literature: a novel written in the authentic vernacular of an uneducated boy from the antebellum South, grappling with the moral catastrophe of slavery through the consciousness of a child who has been taught that helping a slave escape is a sin. The central relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, drove the novel’s moral power. Huck has been raised in a slaveholding society and genuinely believes he is doing wrong by helping Jim. In the book’s climactic moral crisis, Huck decides he would rather go to hell than turn Jim in. "All right, then, I’ll go to hell," he says — a line that reverses the entire moral framework of the society Twain was writing about. The book was controversial from publication. Louisa May Alcott said, "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them." The Concord Library committee called it "trash and suitable only for the slums." Twain, delighted by the ban, noted that it would sell an extra 25,000 copies. Modern controversy centers on the book’s extensive use of a racial slur, with schools regularly debating whether to teach, edit, or remove it. The novel that was banned for being too vulgar in 1885 is now challenged for being too offensive in the 21st century — which may be the strongest evidence that Twain wrote something that refuses to let any era feel comfortable.