The Critical Response to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

Proclaimed by H.L. Mencken as one of the great masterpieces of the world and by Ernest Hemingway as the source of all modern American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains firmly established in both the American and world literary canons as a classic work of literature. Yet it continues to have its critical detractors and still arouses the kind of impassioned controversy that banned it from the Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library on publication as trashy and vicious . The Critical Response to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn contains newspaper articles, book reviews, and scholarly essays spanning the period from the early response in the 1880s, through the centennial celebration, to the present. The collection relects the major literary trends and issues of response to Huckleberry Finn , such as the persistent attempts to ban the book, the literary criticism concerning the book’s ending, and the many thematic interpretations. Among the essayists included are literary figures such as T.S. Elliot and Twain specialist scholars such as Walter Blair, Leo Marx, and James Cox. The text of an ABC-TV Nightline News Special on the centennial, Huckleberry Finn: Literature or Racist Trash is printed. Editor Champion provides an introductory overview on the range and issues of critical response, a feature on the various adaptations of Huckleberry Finn , and a bibliography of additional scholarship. Of interest to any scholar or researcher of Mark Twain, the collection should be valuable to teachers and students reading Huckleberry Finn at any level from high school upward.