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Huckleberry Finn: On The Surface… - College Essay

Huckleberry Finn: On The Surface…

I don’t know anything that mars literature so much as too much truth- Mark Twain
An honest and realistic view of southern life was what Mark Twain had in mind when writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Satiric as this view may have been, it was by no means prejudiced (against blacks). By reading his book and researching his life, one can conclude that only the truly ignorant would think Twain a racist.
Huckleberry Finn has been shrouded in controversy since it was first published in 1885. Concord Public Library officials considered the novel rough, coarse, and none too elegant. It was better suited to the slums than to intelligent “respectable” people. Twain took this insult ...

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United claimed, “Anything that's going to harm any kid - white, black, Hispanic, anything - needs to be removed from required reading… We try to teach them every day not to be racists”(Simmons 1).
This means then, that books that discuss racism to its fullest (fullest including the language of the period) are inappropriate for students to read. Honestly, though, how many high school students haven’t heard the word nigger? And it’s not like Twain’s usage was meant to be derogative- he was merely showing how bad racism was back then. The fact that it remains an issue today- a problem that was never quite solved- is the reason why the book is so criticized. David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident, remarked, “If we’d eradicated the problem of racism in our society, Huckleberry Finn would be the easiest book in the world to teach” (Zwick 2).
When reading the book, one has to keep in mind that Huckleberry Finn is a satire. Twain makes fun of everything from religion and ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 2/5/2008 12:12:48 PM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Free Paper
Words: 881
Pages: 4

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