Word: huck
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...When I was a youngster and I should have been sleeping, I would read about Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher by flashlight underneath the covers at my grandparents' home. Later, a friend and I built a raft and tried to sail across Diamond Lake in Illinois, only to be rescued by fearful adults. When I was 11, my grandmother took me aboard the legendary Delta Queen. Now, after more than 80 years afloat, the Delta Queen is to be put out of service because of inaction by Congress. It brings to mind a Twain saying: "Suppose you were...
...abiding sadness and even bitterness at what he saw as collective human folly. For Twain's influence on race relations, we asked novelist and scholar Stephen L. Carter to address Twain's views on slavery and African Americans. There have been few books more controversial in U.S. history than Huck Finn, but Carter concludes that the novel is profoundly antislavery and that Twain pioneered the sophisticated literary attack on racism. The cover package is introduced and edited by our own Richard Lacayo, who also produced our Teddy Roosevelt issue...
...time, people hated the book because it struck them as coarse. Twain himself wrote that the book's banners considered the novel "trash and suitable only for the slums." More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave whose adventures twine with Huck's, and its frequent use of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often excoriated, never appears...
When the Civil War broke out, Twain may have briefly entertained pro-Union sentiments but at length decided to serve with a ragtag bunch of Confederate irregulars. After a couple of weeks, "hunted like a rat the whole time," he thought better of that commitment and, as Huck Finn did, lit out for the territory. This territory was Nevada and California, where he prospected for silver without luck and practiced scurrilous journalism and general drunkardry with zest...
...pivotal moment in Huckleberry Finn is when Huck decides not to do what his conscience tells him is right, to turn in "Miss Watson's Jim" as a runaway slave. Instead, he decides to abide by his personal affection for Jim, although the upshot will be, according to all he has been taught, eternal damnation for violating the norms of society and its view that a slave is the rightful property of its owner...