Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece

Despite its status as a durable American classic that’s constantly placed on (and removed from) high school reading lists, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is consistently misunderstood and misread, says Butler University English professor Levy (Brain Wider Than the Sky). He teases out Twain’s intentions by contextualizing the months leading up to Huckleberry Finn’s U.S. publication in 1885, when Twain embarked on a tour to drum up sales. Though Twain’s novel is both celebrated and censored for its treatment of race, Levy argues that not only do we misinterpret what Twain had to say about race but we emphasize race at the expense of the book’s equally controversial treatment of childhood and 19th-century anxieties about youth violence. Ironically, Levy’s analysis of Twain’s racial politics is more captivating than what he has to say about Twain’s views on childhood. By reading the complex and shifting semiotics of the minstrel show onto Twain’s novel, Levy gives readers a sense of Twain’s mercurial politics—simultaneously progressive and retrograde. Levy argues that “mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward is a classic American mistake,” one that tells us more about ourselves than about Twain or his novel. [em]Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills LLC. (Jan.) [/em]