A new biography inexplicably exhumes the book-banning case against Huckleberry Finn.
A few years before his death, Mark Twain wandered into a local library that refused to put The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on its shelves on the grounds that it was damaging to schoolchildren. When Twain asked the librarian what was offensive about the book, he told him it was because, in the course of the story, Huck lies.
“Is there nothing else against him?” Twain asked, according to his 1907 retelling.
“No, I think not,” the librarian answered.
So Twain picked up another book. “I see several copies of this book lying around. Are the young forbidden to read it?” he asked.
“Of course not,” responded the librarian.
It was a copy of the Bible. Twain offered to write down a few of its passages demonstrating moral weakness and post them on the library’s wall. The librarian refused.
Even during his life, Twain showed contempt for the “pious” tastemakers who refused to carry his book, which featured the realistic expected behavior from Huck, the “neglected and untaught son of a town drunkard.”
But today, the problem with Huck Finn isn’t that the primary character is a liar, it’s that he uses an ugly word that can no longer be uttered in public.
It is an argument that has been hashed out over decades, and yet for some reason, historian Ron Chernow, in his recent 1,200-page Twain biography, needlessly exhumes the controversy, giving voice to those who believe that the book should be edited to reflect modern language standards.
For instance, in a section following the story of the book’s release, Chernow cites writer Julius Lester, who believes the book “demeans blacks and insults history.”
“It is a picture of the only kind of black that whites have ever truly liked — faithful, tending sick whites, not speaking, not causing trouble, and totally passive,” Lester wrote. The author, who died in 2018, fully backed efforts to ban the book from school curricula.
Chernow himself gives Twain a rap on the knuckles by noting that he “never displayed concern over the word.” In fact, “it doesn’t help his historical reputation that he sometimes used it in his private correspondence when he should have known better.”
Lord, grant us all the confidence of a historian telling the greatest American writer what he should have known in the 1880s and how he could have better expressed himself given modern linguistic mores.
Of course, legions of African-American academics rightly point out how revolutionary Huckleberry Finn was at the time of its publishing. University of Oregon professor and author David Bradley pushed against any censorship of Huck Finn, calling it “a wonderful book that can be read with pure enjoyment after over a hundred years” and that “is important as an artistic model, an artifact of literary history and a social protest novel.”
“Are people younger than 18 really so foggy about the notion that social conditions change over time?” linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter has asked. “And isn’t showing the open use of the word in the past part of showing how far America has come?”
Obviously, a discussion of Samuel Clemens’s work vis-à-vis race relations is warranted and welcome, given how much of his life he dedicated to bettering the lives of black Americans. On page after page, Chernow mentions Twain’s views on race, including his frequent derision of American Indians. (To be fair, Twain despised Mormons as well.)
Yet, when placed in proper context, Twain’s views on racial equality are nothing short of a miracle: the son of a slaveholding family who briefly served in a Confederate militia had, by his mid-30s, begun to identify with the most radical antislavery activists. He frequently wrote searing broadsides against lynching and eventually supported reparations for former slaves.
The year Huckleberry Finn was published, Twain famously paid for Warner T. McGuinn, a black man, to attend Yale Law School. “I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger,” Twain wrote to the law school dean in December, “but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs; & we should pay for it.”
Few people of the era worked as boldly and tirelessly to promote black equality as Samuel Clemens. Nonetheless, the controversy over banning Huck Finn for its “offensive” racial content took hold in the 1950s, when the NAACP urged schools to begin pulling it from their shelves. Soon, publishers began vandalizing the book’s text, with one company issuing a sanitized version that “adapts the dialect spoken by characters whose enslavement denied them access to literacy.”
Without a hint of irony, the company claims that “uninformed readers can too easily jump to erroneous conclusions about the intelligence of the enslaved characters solely on the basis of their utter ignorance of the conventions of the English language.” Yet the most “uninformed” readers of all will be the ones who read the desecrated version of Huckleberry Finn stripped of its most vivid and realistic portrayals of the inhumanity of slavery.
Naturally, when progressives try to pin the “book-banning” label on conservatives, they conveniently forget that the effort to deny schoolchildren the greatest novel America has ever known has come uniformly from the left over the span of decades.
Of course, this disease eventually metastasized in the internet cancel-culture era when similarly dimwitted attempts to bowdlerize the works of P. G. Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and Ian Fleming took hold among people who were either in search of a literary scalp or who didn’t understand the ultimate point of fiction.
What is most puzzling is that Chernow would abet this nonsense. He suggests that the book may be “better reserved for higher education or else studied in conjunction with other contemporary works about slavery and abolitionism.” (Counter-offer: Adults could demonstrate to high school students what intellectual maturity looks like, so that those young people will be capable of handling challenging issues on a college campus without needing “affinity groups” or armies of DEI administrators to hold their hands.)
In fairness, the author concedes that stripping the book of the offending word might be a cure “worse than the disease.” But a reader might then fairly ask: Why is this in the biography at all?
Indeed, much of Chernow’s book is worthy of his exalted stature as a historian (his contribution to the rapping Founding Father community is well documented), save for a few hundred excruciating pages near the end of the book in which Twain virtually drops out of the story and his daughter Jean’s epileptic seizures and a personal drama involving the writer’s secretary become the primary narrative. The first half of the book takes the reader to the year Twain turns 60, and the last half covers the final 15 years of Twain’s life, when he became a sedentary crank.
But when the book is cooking, it is a delectable look at one of America’s greatest minds (and worst businessmen). It hardly seems possible to write an unsatisfactory book about Twain; throw out enough of his aphorisms and observations and you’ve got yourself some white-hot copy no matter the era. The words of Samuel Clemens will lift any biographer to respectability. (And many authors have tried: The Mark Twain House recommends dozens of books about Twain, not even counting the enormous three-volume autobiography that Twain withheld until 100 years after his death and that began appearing in 2010.)
So why would Chernow interrupt the narrative of Twain’s life, pulling the reader out of the book for a stale discussion of what modern people think about the N-word? It may be only a few pages out of thousands, but a small ember from a burning log is enough to ruin your day if it gets in your eye.
Chernow further puts his thumb on the scale at other points in the book. When he cites some insensitive comment of Twain’s, he lets the reader know that it is “unfortunate” or “disappointing” rather than giving us enough credit to recognize this on our own. Chernow simply cannot help but signal to his readers when he feels let down by something uttered by Twain — a son of the South from the first third of the 1800s.
The purpose of a historian is to sift through the infinite morass of information and tell us what’s important — not to recycle tired arguments in an attempt to satiate dimwitted scolds looking to erase unpleasant history. One can only imagine how savagely Twain would have responded to modern attempts to portray his greatest argument against slavery as racially insensitive.
As Twain once said, “No man’s glory is safe until he is dead.” Which is why we should condemn those trying to tarnish Twain’s glory after he is gone.