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Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece
A provocative, exuberant, and deeply researched investigation into Mark Twain’s writing of Huckleberry Finn, which turns on its head everything we thought we knew about America’s favorite icon of childhood.
In Huck Finn’s America, award-winning biographer Andrew Levy shows how modern readers have been misunderstanding Huckleberry Finn for decades. Twain’s masterpiece, which still sells tens of thousands of copies each year and is taught more than any other American classic, is often discussed either as a carefree adventure story for children or a serious novel about race relations, yet Levy argues convincingly it is neither. Instead, Huck Finn was written at a time when Americans were nervous about youth violence and “uncivilized” bad boys, and a debate was raging about education, popular culture, and responsible parenting — casting Huck’s now-celebrated “freedom” in a very different and very modern light. On issues of race, on the other hand, Twain’s lifelong fascination with minstrel shows and black culture inspired him to write a book not about civil rights, but about race’s role in entertainment and commerce, the same features upon which much of our own modern consumer culture is also grounded. In Levy’s vision, Huck Finn has more to say about contemporary children and race that we have ever imagined—if we are willing to hear it.
An eye-opening, groundbreaking exploration of the character and psyche of Mark Twain as he was writing his most famous novel, Huck Finn’s America brings the past to vivid, surprising life, and offers a persuasive—and controversial—argument for why this American classic deserves to be understood anew.
In Huck Finn’s America, award-winning biographer Andrew Levy shows how modern readers have been misunderstanding Huckleberry Finn for decades. Twain’s masterpiece, which still sells tens of thousands of copies each year and is taught more than any other American classic, is often discussed either as a carefree adventure story for children or a serious novel about race relations, yet Levy argues convincingly it is neither. Instead, Huck Finn was written at a time when Americans were nervous about youth violence and “uncivilized” bad boys, and a debate was raging about education, popular culture, and responsible parenting — casting Huck’s now-celebrated “freedom” in a very different and very modern light. On issues of race, on the other hand, Twain’s lifelong fascination with minstrel shows and black culture inspired him to write a book not about civil rights, but about race’s role in entertainment and commerce, the same features upon which much of our own modern consumer culture is also grounded. In Levy’s vision, Huck Finn has more to say about contemporary children and race that we have ever imagined—if we are willing to hear it.
An eye-opening, groundbreaking exploration of the character and psyche of Mark Twain as he was writing his most famous novel, Huck Finn’s America brings the past to vivid, surprising life, and offers a persuasive—and controversial—argument for why this American classic deserves to be understood anew.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published September 17, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
March 9, 2015
Looking beneath the mythology...
Not so long ago, I re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time since childhood, and came away from it puzzled as to why, firstly, it has such a reputation as a literary masterpiece and, secondly, and more importantly, it is seen as a great anti-slavery/anti-racist tract. My own feeling was that the portrayal of the slaves was hardly one that inspired me to think the book was in any way a clarion call for recognition of racial equality – I said “...the slaves really do come off as almost terminally stupid. It felt almost as if Twain was really highlighting something more akin to animal cruelty than endorsing any suggestion of true equality between the races, and as a result it left me feeling quite uncomfortable.” The blurb for Huck Finn's America promised that Levy would be taking a fresh look at the book, arguing that “Twain’s lifelong fascination with minstrel shows and black culture inspired him to write a book not about civil rights, but about race’s role in entertainment and commerce, the same features upon which much of our own modern consumer culture is also grounded.” As you can imagine, I was predisposed to find his arguments persuasive.
Andrew Levy is Edna Cooper Chair in English at Butler University, Indianapolis, and it's clear that he knows his subject thoroughly. He also has the gift of writing in a style that is enjoyable and easily accessible to the non-academic reader. His position is that Huck Finn must be seen through the double prism of Twain's own experiences and the questions that were exercising society at the time he was writing, so the book has elements of biography as well as literary criticism, and also takes an in-depth look at the cultural and political debates that were going on in the public arena.
The other main aspect of Huck Finn is, of course, childhood, and here Levy argues that, rather than being some great paean to the joys of a childhood freed from the constraints of education, it is actually a reflection of the concern of society around bad-boy culture. He looks at contemporaneous news reporting to show that there was a huge debate going on around adolescent criminality, and the state's role in tackling this through education. There was concern that boys' behaviour was being influenced by the pulp fiction of the day, that bad parenting was a contributing factor, and there was a split between those who believed that more regimentation in education was the cause or the cure. If this all sounds eerily familiar, Levy suggests that is partly Twain's point – that history goes round in circles – nothing ever really changes because man's nature remains the same.
And, in Levy's opinion, Twain is saying something similar about race. He is making the point that emancipation had failed to achieve its aims at the time he was writing. Slavery may have been nominally abolished, but black men are being imprisoned in their thousands for minor criminality and then being hired out as labour for pennies. The Jim Crow laws are on the near horizon – segregation in the South is well under way. Levy suggests that the problematic last section of the book, where Tom keeps Jim imprisoned despite knowing that he is now a free man, should be seen as a satire on the status of black people nearly thirty years after emancipation.
However, while Levy accepts Twain's anti-racist stance in this last section, he also shows convincingly that much of the rest of the portrayal of race in the book comes out of Twain's nostalgic love for the minstrel shows of his youth. Thus Jim is not exactly a representative of 'real' black people, so much as the caricatured version of the blacked-up minstrels. Levy tells us that in the early days of minstrelsy, in Twain's childhood, the shows were less racist than they became later, and often were in fact used as vehicles for some fairly liberal views. But he also makes it clear that Twain was trying to recapture the 'fun' of this form of entertainment. He suggests that this aspect of the book would have been recognisable to contemporary audiences but, because minstrelsy has now become such a taboo subject, is generally missed by readers today.
Tying these arguments together, the fact that contemporary audiences would have recognised Huck as a 'bad boy' would have made it much more acceptable to associate him with a black man – both were seen as low down on the social scale, primitive even, and quite probably criminal. Levy acknowledges Twain's intellectual anti-racism in his later years, but suggests that he retained a nostalgia for the slave-holding world of his childhood and always continued to think of black people as being there to 'serve' him. Rather than a call for equality, Twain was using black culture to entertain white people, and only those from the Northern states at that. And again Levy makes the point that black culture is often adopted by white people in much the same way still – as Twain suggested, history is a circle.
I found this a very well-written and interesting book. Already having doubts about the extravagant claims made for Twain's anti-racist credentials, I admit that part of my enjoyment was because it gives a solidly researched and explained base to my own instinctive reservations about Huck Finn. That's not to suggest that Levy is doing some kind of hatchet job on either Twain or Huck – he clearly greatly admires both the man and the book. But he has brushed aside some of the mythology that has grown up around it over the last century and put it firmly back into its own context. Highly recommended.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Simon & Schuster.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Not so long ago, I re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time since childhood, and came away from it puzzled as to why, firstly, it has such a reputation as a literary masterpiece and, secondly, and more importantly, it is seen as a great anti-slavery/anti-racist tract. My own feeling was that the portrayal of the slaves was hardly one that inspired me to think the book was in any way a clarion call for recognition of racial equality – I said “...the slaves really do come off as almost terminally stupid. It felt almost as if Twain was really highlighting something more akin to animal cruelty than endorsing any suggestion of true equality between the races, and as a result it left me feeling quite uncomfortable.” The blurb for Huck Finn's America promised that Levy would be taking a fresh look at the book, arguing that “Twain’s lifelong fascination with minstrel shows and black culture inspired him to write a book not about civil rights, but about race’s role in entertainment and commerce, the same features upon which much of our own modern consumer culture is also grounded.” As you can imagine, I was predisposed to find his arguments persuasive.
Andrew Levy is Edna Cooper Chair in English at Butler University, Indianapolis, and it's clear that he knows his subject thoroughly. He also has the gift of writing in a style that is enjoyable and easily accessible to the non-academic reader. His position is that Huck Finn must be seen through the double prism of Twain's own experiences and the questions that were exercising society at the time he was writing, so the book has elements of biography as well as literary criticism, and also takes an in-depth look at the cultural and political debates that were going on in the public arena.
The other main aspect of Huck Finn is, of course, childhood, and here Levy argues that, rather than being some great paean to the joys of a childhood freed from the constraints of education, it is actually a reflection of the concern of society around bad-boy culture. He looks at contemporaneous news reporting to show that there was a huge debate going on around adolescent criminality, and the state's role in tackling this through education. There was concern that boys' behaviour was being influenced by the pulp fiction of the day, that bad parenting was a contributing factor, and there was a split between those who believed that more regimentation in education was the cause or the cure. If this all sounds eerily familiar, Levy suggests that is partly Twain's point – that history goes round in circles – nothing ever really changes because man's nature remains the same.
And, in Levy's opinion, Twain is saying something similar about race. He is making the point that emancipation had failed to achieve its aims at the time he was writing. Slavery may have been nominally abolished, but black men are being imprisoned in their thousands for minor criminality and then being hired out as labour for pennies. The Jim Crow laws are on the near horizon – segregation in the South is well under way. Levy suggests that the problematic last section of the book, where Tom keeps Jim imprisoned despite knowing that he is now a free man, should be seen as a satire on the status of black people nearly thirty years after emancipation.
However, while Levy accepts Twain's anti-racist stance in this last section, he also shows convincingly that much of the rest of the portrayal of race in the book comes out of Twain's nostalgic love for the minstrel shows of his youth. Thus Jim is not exactly a representative of 'real' black people, so much as the caricatured version of the blacked-up minstrels. Levy tells us that in the early days of minstrelsy, in Twain's childhood, the shows were less racist than they became later, and often were in fact used as vehicles for some fairly liberal views. But he also makes it clear that Twain was trying to recapture the 'fun' of this form of entertainment. He suggests that this aspect of the book would have been recognisable to contemporary audiences but, because minstrelsy has now become such a taboo subject, is generally missed by readers today.
Tying these arguments together, the fact that contemporary audiences would have recognised Huck as a 'bad boy' would have made it much more acceptable to associate him with a black man – both were seen as low down on the social scale, primitive even, and quite probably criminal. Levy acknowledges Twain's intellectual anti-racism in his later years, but suggests that he retained a nostalgia for the slave-holding world of his childhood and always continued to think of black people as being there to 'serve' him. Rather than a call for equality, Twain was using black culture to entertain white people, and only those from the Northern states at that. And again Levy makes the point that black culture is often adopted by white people in much the same way still – as Twain suggested, history is a circle.
I found this a very well-written and interesting book. Already having doubts about the extravagant claims made for Twain's anti-racist credentials, I admit that part of my enjoyment was because it gives a solidly researched and explained base to my own instinctive reservations about Huck Finn. That's not to suggest that Levy is doing some kind of hatchet job on either Twain or Huck – he clearly greatly admires both the man and the book. But he has brushed aside some of the mythology that has grown up around it over the last century and put it firmly back into its own context. Highly recommended.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Simon & Schuster.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
March 16, 2016
I found this fascinating. According to Levy, my recent disappointment with the ending of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck allows Jim to remain imprisoned for weeks and contributes to his misery by putting snakes, rats, spiders in his cell and making him write messages in his own blood when Huck could easily set him free, merely so that Tom Sawyer, who knows Jim's owner freed him at her death, can enjoy an elaborate game of “free the prisoner,” was actually a result of my misunderstanding of the sort of story Twain was writing. Andrew Levy's intriguing book offers a more nuanced understanding of Twain's classic, tracing Twain's changing views on race throughout his life, and most particularly from his early years to the time he finished Huckleberry Finn, as well as on racial attitudes in America at the time, but also pointing out the extent to which childhood and child-rearing, more than race issues, were Twain's focus in the book. Part One of the book focuses on issues related to childhood, while Part Two concerns 19th century debates on race.
Levy's explanation goes a long way toward explaining the rather jarring shift in tone which occurs in Chapter 33, when Tom Sawyer reenters the story. Huck's willingness to allow Jim to serve as a prop in Tom's rather sadistic “suffering prisoner” game is certainly plausible, however narratively unsatisfying, in light of his oft-expressed admiration for his socially superior, better educated friend. Given the episode early in the book, in which Tom, with Huck's cooperation, tricks Jim into believing he's been ridden by witches, Tom's later, elaborate game with Jim gives the book a certain circularity. Despite this, when I recently read Huckleberry Finn I found the ending a “cheat” – a descent into slapstick and a reversion by Huck to treating Jim as an inferior whose abuse was acceptable if it provided entertainment. By Levy's interpretation, however, the ending, which apparently, was not a “rush” job, but actually a part with which Twain was particularly pleased, was consistent with the book he intended to write. He was interested in improving the situation of African-Americans, certainly, but he was also very concerned with portraying children rebelling against conventions and rules, and with writing an entertaining story of independent, high-spirited boys. And he had a lifelong affection for minstrel shows, aspects of which, Levy shows us, appear in various guises throughout the book. Reading the book through the lens Levy provides clears up certain aspects of the book which otherwise seem inconsistent, and the insights he offers into 19th century concerns are interesting just for themselves!
Levy reminds us that concerns about the impact of media on impressionable youth were as prevalent in Twain's day as they are in ours. The news stories he cites suggest a time no more idyllic than our own, in which boys and teenagers commit acts of horrific violence and commentators blame the corrupting influence of violence-filled media.
In the midst of an ugly presidential election year, when racial issues are once again in play, it is difficult to deny Twain's prescience.
Levy's exploration over the course of his book of 19th century ideas about parenting, education, juvenile delinquency, criminality, and race issues, and his examination of Twain's changing attitudes on these topics through his personal and public writings, offers new insights into the unexpectedly complex themes of Twain's masterpiece. If that makes the book sound excessively scholarly, it's because I'm putting it badly, as it is really a very enjoyable read for anyone interested in 19th century American literature and history.
Levy's explanation goes a long way toward explaining the rather jarring shift in tone which occurs in Chapter 33, when Tom Sawyer reenters the story. Huck's willingness to allow Jim to serve as a prop in Tom's rather sadistic “suffering prisoner” game is certainly plausible, however narratively unsatisfying, in light of his oft-expressed admiration for his socially superior, better educated friend. Given the episode early in the book, in which Tom, with Huck's cooperation, tricks Jim into believing he's been ridden by witches, Tom's later, elaborate game with Jim gives the book a certain circularity. Despite this, when I recently read Huckleberry Finn I found the ending a “cheat” – a descent into slapstick and a reversion by Huck to treating Jim as an inferior whose abuse was acceptable if it provided entertainment. By Levy's interpretation, however, the ending, which apparently, was not a “rush” job, but actually a part with which Twain was particularly pleased, was consistent with the book he intended to write. He was interested in improving the situation of African-Americans, certainly, but he was also very concerned with portraying children rebelling against conventions and rules, and with writing an entertaining story of independent, high-spirited boys. And he had a lifelong affection for minstrel shows, aspects of which, Levy shows us, appear in various guises throughout the book. Reading the book through the lens Levy provides clears up certain aspects of the book which otherwise seem inconsistent, and the insights he offers into 19th century concerns are interesting just for themselves!
Levy reminds us that concerns about the impact of media on impressionable youth were as prevalent in Twain's day as they are in ours. The news stories he cites suggest a time no more idyllic than our own, in which boys and teenagers commit acts of horrific violence and commentators blame the corrupting influence of violence-filled media.
In the midst of an ugly presidential election year, when racial issues are once again in play, it is difficult to deny Twain's prescience.
”The consensus of the twentieth century made one simple mistake about Huck Finn, but it echoed: they believed that it made a difference when Huck said he'd go to hell to free Jim. And they figured Twain failed when it didn't – or, like Ronald Reagan or Arthur Schlesinger, they figured he didn't fail at all. And as they told this story, they told the bigger story for which they made Huck Finn stand in: that the “final emancipation” of African-Americans, as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in 1948, was “real and historical.” But that was exactly what Huck Finn was not saying. And mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward is a classic American mistake. Writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, surveying all that blood and treasure spent to free slaves, and then Reconstruction collapsing, convict-lease, the rise of the Klan, Jim Crow, lynchings – Mark Twain eventually dedicated Huck Finn to the proposition that, contra Lincoln, there was no new birth of freedom.”
Levy's exploration over the course of his book of 19th century ideas about parenting, education, juvenile delinquency, criminality, and race issues, and his examination of Twain's changing attitudes on these topics through his personal and public writings, offers new insights into the unexpectedly complex themes of Twain's masterpiece. If that makes the book sound excessively scholarly, it's because I'm putting it badly, as it is really a very enjoyable read for anyone interested in 19th century American literature and history.
March 12, 2015
While covering some some material in an original way, some of the book seems unfocused. A lot of the material in the notes could have been incorporated into the text.
September 19, 2023
Andrew Levy is a diligent, hard-working scholar, but he's too cautious and too much of an equivocator to ever say anything really important. Mark Twain loved minstrel shows. Minstrel shows are racist, except when they're not. The n-word is unacceptable, except when it's not. Mark Twain never used racial stereotypes, except to illuminate the absurdities of racism. This is the kind of thing that gets really old after a couple of chapters. I wish Andrew Levy had taken a stand on something. Or a stand on anything! Some great background on George Washington Cable, though.
April 14, 2024
This was very well researched and gave me substantial insight into both the original document and Percival Everett's James.
September 21, 2022
A dense academic (needed my dictionary more then a few times) and fascinating read. I enjoyed this book on multiple levels. As an opportunity to re-examine Huck Finn from a new perspective it is fascinating. For me Huck Finn is one of the best books ever, I recently introduced my boys to it and after reading this book I am keen to revisit it with the gained perspective this book has given me. On top of all the interesting insights to one of the most controversial books ever this book is a fascinating history lesson and parenting guide. The history part is eerie as Levy parallels the 1820’s and the 2020’s from a historical political perspective and the parallels are depressing. Similarly when he calls books the FPS (first person shooter) of their time (the 1800’s) I was a little comforted as a parent. A fascinating read all round.
June 25, 2015
This is a fascinating book, one I'd like to write about at greater length at some point, and one that I intend to keep thinking about each year when I teach Huck Finn. Levy's overarching argument is that, when it was published, Twain's novel was seen primarily as a comment on the debates raging at the time about children—how to educate them, how to handle their delinquency, and how to incorporate them into society. Twain wrote numerous works about children, typically depicting them in a type of generational war against adults, and, as in Huck, Twain was definitively on the children's side.
If childhood was generally understood to be the book's obvious foreground, very few of the book's early readers saw the book's "hidden agenda"—a scathing indictment of American racism and the wrongheadedness of the emerging white consensus about African Americans' place in the nation. Only the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle saw the thread of anti-racist satire running through the book, Levy notes; Twain himself told his sister, "Only the Chronicle understands the book."
Yet Twain's own caginess and trickery was at least partly to blame for readers' failures to see his progressive satire. The novel's use of minstrel tropes and routines may have signaled easily recognizable stereotypes to readers primed to see and believe such reductive images, but Levy argues that Twain was actually harkening back to an earlier minstrel tradition in which "stereotype and comedy leak sedition," speaking truths about oppression that would cause listeners to reach for tar and feathers if they were spoken directly.
To promote Huck, before its publication Twain went on tour with George Washington Cable, a white novelist from New Orleans noted for his masterful use of dialect, in his case that of Creoles in his home town. During the tour, Cable published a strident essay called "The Freedman's Case in Equity" which critiqued segregation and convict leasing—essentially speaking what Twain himself believed, but without the protective equivocation. The essay created a firestorm, made Cable a lot of enemies, and ultimately led to a falling-out between Cable and Twain. Only later in his career would Twain dare to be so straightforward in his condemnation of racism and injustice—in his fiery anti-colonial writings.
The final fifth of Huck is a travesty in which Jim, who is actually free, is re-enslaved and subjected to interminable nonsense by Tom Sawyer, with Huck's complicity. Tom wishes that he could draw out Jim's emancipation for 80 years and leave him to his children to free. The subtext, Twain believed, should have been clear to anyone who cared about what America was doing to its black citizens at the time. As decades passed, however, and Huck became enshrined in the American literary canon, white Americans stripped away the bitterness of its ending and turned it into a simple celebration of a young white boy's heroic (if lovably muddle-headed) resistance against slavery, thus "mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward." It's a typically American mistake, Levy argues.
This book affirms the approaches that I've learned to use in teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it also gives me a lot of useful nuggets that will add nuance to my approach.
If childhood was generally understood to be the book's obvious foreground, very few of the book's early readers saw the book's "hidden agenda"—a scathing indictment of American racism and the wrongheadedness of the emerging white consensus about African Americans' place in the nation. Only the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle saw the thread of anti-racist satire running through the book, Levy notes; Twain himself told his sister, "Only the Chronicle understands the book."
Yet Twain's own caginess and trickery was at least partly to blame for readers' failures to see his progressive satire. The novel's use of minstrel tropes and routines may have signaled easily recognizable stereotypes to readers primed to see and believe such reductive images, but Levy argues that Twain was actually harkening back to an earlier minstrel tradition in which "stereotype and comedy leak sedition," speaking truths about oppression that would cause listeners to reach for tar and feathers if they were spoken directly.
To promote Huck, before its publication Twain went on tour with George Washington Cable, a white novelist from New Orleans noted for his masterful use of dialect, in his case that of Creoles in his home town. During the tour, Cable published a strident essay called "The Freedman's Case in Equity" which critiqued segregation and convict leasing—essentially speaking what Twain himself believed, but without the protective equivocation. The essay created a firestorm, made Cable a lot of enemies, and ultimately led to a falling-out between Cable and Twain. Only later in his career would Twain dare to be so straightforward in his condemnation of racism and injustice—in his fiery anti-colonial writings.
The final fifth of Huck is a travesty in which Jim, who is actually free, is re-enslaved and subjected to interminable nonsense by Tom Sawyer, with Huck's complicity. Tom wishes that he could draw out Jim's emancipation for 80 years and leave him to his children to free. The subtext, Twain believed, should have been clear to anyone who cared about what America was doing to its black citizens at the time. As decades passed, however, and Huck became enshrined in the American literary canon, white Americans stripped away the bitterness of its ending and turned it into a simple celebration of a young white boy's heroic (if lovably muddle-headed) resistance against slavery, thus "mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward." It's a typically American mistake, Levy argues.
This book affirms the approaches that I've learned to use in teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it also gives me a lot of useful nuggets that will add nuance to my approach.
April 28, 2015
I found this a fascinating history, centered around Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN and how it is a part of the context of the troubled history of the 19th century in America, one that brought about the civil war. Each reader brings to Huckleberry Finn his own experience, and what Levy successfully does is expand that consciousness. The result is that HUCKLEBERRY FINN is a deeply ambiguous work, ambiguous both about the relationship between children and adults and between blacks and whites.
As to children, the question is always how they are to be raised, how are they to be educated? Twain presents Huck Finn as a wild child who chafes at conventional education and religion. His friend, Tom, is a product of that education and he is broadly satirized as having head filled full of nonsense, unlike Huck who despite having no mother, a drunken father, and spending most of his time with an uneducated slave, exhibits more common sense and creativity than does Tom. What does all of this say about what is really important in educating a child? Obviously, plenty of room for different interpretations here.
The other important, and I thought more interesting pat of the book, has to do with race relations. Levy finds a key line in the book to be Aunt Sally's forgiving comment (this after Tom has set up the ridiculously complicated scheme to "rescue" Jim from slavery, even though he knows he is already a free man), "Boys will be boys." Given the background of the recently fought Civil War and the withdrawal of federal troops in 1875 (Twain's book was published in l885), the book obliquely comments on the irony of the civil war being fought to abolish slavery, but in less than 10 years, the south was left to its own resources. A usually unfair crop sharing system, Jim Crow laws, and common lynchings of blacks were the result. Twain, a cynical man, might well have asked what was the point of the Civil War, if its ideals were not to be implemented?
Twain, though, was a complex figure who was ambivalent. When he went on the road with his performance shows, he imitated the minstrel culture of the 19th century where whites put on black face makeup and made fun of blacks. Twain had a very good ear and could do black dialect perfectly. At the same time, though, he had sympathy for blacks, something that comes out in HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Yes, Jim is unlettered, gullible, and superstitious, but he is a true father figure to the white boy, Huck, so here race doesn't matter.
Twain was on all sides, then, and it's difficult to know what to make of his masterpiece, or of 19th century American culture for that matter, as one mirrored the other. Huck is made up of bits and pieces of different genres (the minstrel show tradition, for one) and generations. Just as the North fought the civil war to abolish slavery, it didn't want to pay the price for bringing about full equality, at the end of Twain's novel, Huck, for all of his sympathetic feelings toward Jim, does not try to stop Tom from his foolish games that almost get Jim killed.
Levy concludes that Twain's vision was an "echoic" one that saw the past as repeating or echoing itself, and not being recognized in the present by those who were doing the repeating.
As to children, the question is always how they are to be raised, how are they to be educated? Twain presents Huck Finn as a wild child who chafes at conventional education and religion. His friend, Tom, is a product of that education and he is broadly satirized as having head filled full of nonsense, unlike Huck who despite having no mother, a drunken father, and spending most of his time with an uneducated slave, exhibits more common sense and creativity than does Tom. What does all of this say about what is really important in educating a child? Obviously, plenty of room for different interpretations here.
The other important, and I thought more interesting pat of the book, has to do with race relations. Levy finds a key line in the book to be Aunt Sally's forgiving comment (this after Tom has set up the ridiculously complicated scheme to "rescue" Jim from slavery, even though he knows he is already a free man), "Boys will be boys." Given the background of the recently fought Civil War and the withdrawal of federal troops in 1875 (Twain's book was published in l885), the book obliquely comments on the irony of the civil war being fought to abolish slavery, but in less than 10 years, the south was left to its own resources. A usually unfair crop sharing system, Jim Crow laws, and common lynchings of blacks were the result. Twain, a cynical man, might well have asked what was the point of the Civil War, if its ideals were not to be implemented?
Twain, though, was a complex figure who was ambivalent. When he went on the road with his performance shows, he imitated the minstrel culture of the 19th century where whites put on black face makeup and made fun of blacks. Twain had a very good ear and could do black dialect perfectly. At the same time, though, he had sympathy for blacks, something that comes out in HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Yes, Jim is unlettered, gullible, and superstitious, but he is a true father figure to the white boy, Huck, so here race doesn't matter.
Twain was on all sides, then, and it's difficult to know what to make of his masterpiece, or of 19th century American culture for that matter, as one mirrored the other. Huck is made up of bits and pieces of different genres (the minstrel show tradition, for one) and generations. Just as the North fought the civil war to abolish slavery, it didn't want to pay the price for bringing about full equality, at the end of Twain's novel, Huck, for all of his sympathetic feelings toward Jim, does not try to stop Tom from his foolish games that almost get Jim killed.
Levy concludes that Twain's vision was an "echoic" one that saw the past as repeating or echoing itself, and not being recognized in the present by those who were doing the repeating.
August 13, 2017
I really liked the book. Since I have taught the book in Lit. Crit, I liked Levy's perspective on childhood which I had never really considered. His focus on minstrelsy added another perspective on the novel. Having also seen the PBS documentary on Twain, Levy's perspective on the forces that shaped Huck Finn filled in some of the gaps and answered some of the questions that PBS hadn't really addressed.
Levy addresses the issues that surround the novel, particularly the racial elements of the novel as they relate to Twain's era and ours. He isn't afraid to tackle the n-word, and presents a balanced perspective that I found to be refreshing.
For the question of Twain's views on race, Levy does a masterful job of citing many Twain texts that are not often read to make a case that Twain uses the novel to expose the racism of his time, and to provide a glimpse into the future of race relations in the 20th century.
This isn't a pleasure read, so if you are going to read this, you need to understand that it is literary criticism. It is unique in that the text is 196 pages and the notes are an additional 130 pages. If you like documentation, Levy has done the homework.
If you are a student of American literature, this book is an essential read. Any of my students reading this review? You need to read this book.
Levy addresses the issues that surround the novel, particularly the racial elements of the novel as they relate to Twain's era and ours. He isn't afraid to tackle the n-word, and presents a balanced perspective that I found to be refreshing.
For the question of Twain's views on race, Levy does a masterful job of citing many Twain texts that are not often read to make a case that Twain uses the novel to expose the racism of his time, and to provide a glimpse into the future of race relations in the 20th century.
This isn't a pleasure read, so if you are going to read this, you need to understand that it is literary criticism. It is unique in that the text is 196 pages and the notes are an additional 130 pages. If you like documentation, Levy has done the homework.
If you are a student of American literature, this book is an essential read. Any of my students reading this review? You need to read this book.
May 26, 2015
. Levy contends that Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was intended more as an inquiry into the nature of race in America rather than just a tale for boys. He isn’t the first to claim this, but he goes a bit farther in defending the conclusion to the novel which many disavowed as a cop-out or a retreat to the Tom Sawyer adventure genre. His notion that much of the book stems from Twain’s fascination with minstrel shows is interesting and to an extent convincing. Much of Levy’s book is centered on the psychological climate in which Twain wrote. Dime novels were seen as instigators of bad boy behavior (much as video games are indicted today) and critics of Twain denounced his treatment of Huck as inciting laziness and crime. Huckleberry Finn is one of America’s most controversial novels, from the date of its publishing to the present day. Hemingway credited it as the forefather of all modern American writing. Levy’s exploration is interesting, though sometimes meandering.
February 10, 2015
As much as I have taught this to high school students, have read and reread it myself, and have read much literary criticism and analysis, I was here given a fresh perspective on Twain's masterpiece. Levy focuses on the role of minstrelsy in shaping much of the dynamics of race in the work. In addition, he celebrates Huck as the outsider "bad boy" instinctively fighting the civilizing forces aimed at corrupting his dynamic personality. In both cases Levy links these ideas with contemporary issues, whether they be rap performance or ADHD medicating.
The book is well researched with pages of extensive references and notes. The novel is solidly placed within the period of its writing and even connects with Twain's life, particularly in the role of his own children in illuminating his understanding of childhood.
The book is well researched with pages of extensive references and notes. The novel is solidly placed within the period of its writing and even connects with Twain's life, particularly in the role of his own children in illuminating his understanding of childhood.
November 19, 2014
A special thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for a free download of Huck Finn's America by Andrew Levy.
Huck Finn's America is a nonfictional account of the social and political climate that influenced Mark Twain as he wrote Huck Finn. Mr. Levy suggests that the childhood classic was written not only to address the issue of race, but also as a commentary on raucous teenage boys. Huck Finn's America is insightful if a little dry, but I would recommend it to anyone who likes to read between the lines of our favorite American novels.
Huck Finn's America is a nonfictional account of the social and political climate that influenced Mark Twain as he wrote Huck Finn. Mr. Levy suggests that the childhood classic was written not only to address the issue of race, but also as a commentary on raucous teenage boys. Huck Finn's America is insightful if a little dry, but I would recommend it to anyone who likes to read between the lines of our favorite American novels.
June 21, 2015
Levy sets out to argue that we’ve misinterpreted Twain’s classic, but, I believe, fails to support his claim that it's about childhood and race in ways that are very different from the view we take of the book today. He's obviously immersed in his topic. His work has received some glowing reviews. But I frequently wondered how he came to certain assumptions and often felt he misjudged. Also, this book meanders more than the mighty Mississippi.
March 30, 2015
Proof positive that it is who you know at the NY Times. This is a seriously disjointed book.
May 5, 2015
Fascinating, eye-opening examination of Twain's process and cultural context. If you teach Huckleberry Finn, you need to read this book!
June 30, 2015
Levy, Andrew. Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2015 (342pp.$25).
In tandem with Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Melville’s Moby Dick, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as the oft acknowledged foundation of an authentic American literature emerging from a murky undergrowth of English romanticism and Gothic horror, common to popular fiction in the mid-eighteenth century. Each of these classic texts exhibits a polyglot argot drawn from Biblical language, a melting pot of “frontier” tongues, local slang, and the sometimes peculiar linguistic drama of emergent democracy (“Leaves”), whaling (“Moby Dick”) or southern slave culture (“Huck Finn”). All three are acknowledged by academics, critics and the general public as unusual documents, sometimes flawed by stylistic exuberance, but exhibiting each author’s raw and sometimes spectacular vision nonetheless. Of the three, only Twain’s “masterpiece” continues as a controversial subject because of its use of a racial epithet that clearly demeans African-Americans, causes pain to many people in our country today, and because of its sometimes confused and stereotypical depiction of slaves. The teaching of “Huck Finn”, the publication of bowdlerized texts, the deletion of the “n” word from others, and the general debate about the contemporary value of the work has tasked teachers, School Boards and the Academy since public schools were integrated in the late 1950s.
Andrew Levy, Edna Cooper Chair in English at Butler University, has written a new evaluation of Twain’s book about a boy who runs off down the Mississippi River with a slave name Jim, “lighting out for the territories”. Because Twain’s famous book sells tens of thousands of copies each year and is perhaps the most discussed, cussed, and taught American classic in public schools, such a task is bound to be daunting, presenting the cultural critic with a high bar to convincing us that Huck deserves to be understood anew. Fortunately, Levy brings off the task with delightful, exuberant, and witty skill. Arguing against the standard interpretation of “Huck Finn” as a boy’s adventure story or a serious novel about race relations in the Border States, Levy instead produces a more nuanced and “holistic” view of the book based on Twain’s own lifelong interest in popular culture, minstrelsy, education, juvenile delinquency and social violence. In short, Twain’s classic isn’t about slavery at all, but about “bad boys”, slaves as objects of “popular entertainment”, educational reform (an argument prominent in the mid 1850s), and the relation between parents and their children.
For starters, Levy evaluates the youth of Samuel Clements in Hannibal and finds all the themes of “Huck” present in the little river town. Here’s what happened to young Sam in Hannibal before he was all of twenty years old: He ran away from home without telling his mother and wrote travel letters from New York, where in seedy Manhattan bars he was the Western “innocent”…Over and over, the idea of costume and race appealed to him. He fell in love with New Orleans and the Mardi Gras, the parade of “men, grotesque, laughable costumes…giants, Indians, minstrels, monks, priests, clowns, birds, beasts, everything”, and insisted that America’s true heart lay in that carnival.
He also had a death wish. When measles swept into town (Hannibal), he snuck out one night and crawled into bed with the afflicted Will Bowen, his best friend…He loved the water, and by his recollection almost drowned eight or nine times. Another time he dove off a riverboat to retrieve a lost hat, but swam so far downstream the town suspected he was dead, and began firing cannons over the water to coax his body to the surface. “People born to be hanged are safe in water, “his mother told him. He was a sleepwalker. He tried, at age nine, to sneak off on a riverboat. At fourteen, he got caught dancing naked by two anonymous girls as he rehearsed for his part as “bear” in a playlet to be performed at one of his older sister’s parties.
He loved smoking, role-playing, arguing, and getting people to defend what they, in other circumstances would decry…And along the way, Sam Clemens got a remarkable education on black culture and race relations in the years before the Civil War. He apparently watched his father’s autopsy through a keyhole. He watched a knife fight in which a “young California immigrant” took a bowie knife in the chest. While playing on a river island, his gang was terrified as the remains of an assassinated slave named Neriam Todd rose out of the water. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined a group of Missouri confederate marauders, then deserted and went West. These experiences and many more shaped the man who became Mark Twain. Each shows up in “Huck Finn”, forming the core cultural shape of the novel.
Much of Levy’s cultural analysis focuses on the debate raging in the 1840s about juvenile delinquency. Newspapers of the time were filled with stories of youth violence, parental neglect and child labor. Moreover, by the 1830s, “blackface” had become something new and cool, a form of potent popular culture that was simultaneously surreally revolutionary and deeply racist. Levy shows how Clements was a life-long devotee of minstrelsy and how the “popular art” of blackface seeped into Mark Twain’s book. “Huck Finn’s America” in this regard is a highly readable foray into the history of popular culture and commercial entertainment. It is easy to see where Twain got his penchant for “dialect”, tall tales, and exaggeration. Levy’s conclusion that “Huck” is about “bad boys”, parent-child relations, and race as “entertainment” does provide a new pivot around which to understand this American classic.
Explaining the “n” word is, however, another story. Levy seems as stumped as the rest of us about how to teach a great classic that is so demeaning to so many of our fellow citizens. He attempts to trace the academic arguments structuring so much of our response to this contemptible epithet, the response to it from the Civil Rights community, and his own reflections to these problems. As important as this dialogue is, the books sags through these sections.
Still and all, readers wanting to engage this American classic yet again can learn much about both Twain and America and bring “new eyes” to Huck and Jim.
In tandem with Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Melville’s Moby Dick, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as the oft acknowledged foundation of an authentic American literature emerging from a murky undergrowth of English romanticism and Gothic horror, common to popular fiction in the mid-eighteenth century. Each of these classic texts exhibits a polyglot argot drawn from Biblical language, a melting pot of “frontier” tongues, local slang, and the sometimes peculiar linguistic drama of emergent democracy (“Leaves”), whaling (“Moby Dick”) or southern slave culture (“Huck Finn”). All three are acknowledged by academics, critics and the general public as unusual documents, sometimes flawed by stylistic exuberance, but exhibiting each author’s raw and sometimes spectacular vision nonetheless. Of the three, only Twain’s “masterpiece” continues as a controversial subject because of its use of a racial epithet that clearly demeans African-Americans, causes pain to many people in our country today, and because of its sometimes confused and stereotypical depiction of slaves. The teaching of “Huck Finn”, the publication of bowdlerized texts, the deletion of the “n” word from others, and the general debate about the contemporary value of the work has tasked teachers, School Boards and the Academy since public schools were integrated in the late 1950s.
Andrew Levy, Edna Cooper Chair in English at Butler University, has written a new evaluation of Twain’s book about a boy who runs off down the Mississippi River with a slave name Jim, “lighting out for the territories”. Because Twain’s famous book sells tens of thousands of copies each year and is perhaps the most discussed, cussed, and taught American classic in public schools, such a task is bound to be daunting, presenting the cultural critic with a high bar to convincing us that Huck deserves to be understood anew. Fortunately, Levy brings off the task with delightful, exuberant, and witty skill. Arguing against the standard interpretation of “Huck Finn” as a boy’s adventure story or a serious novel about race relations in the Border States, Levy instead produces a more nuanced and “holistic” view of the book based on Twain’s own lifelong interest in popular culture, minstrelsy, education, juvenile delinquency and social violence. In short, Twain’s classic isn’t about slavery at all, but about “bad boys”, slaves as objects of “popular entertainment”, educational reform (an argument prominent in the mid 1850s), and the relation between parents and their children.
For starters, Levy evaluates the youth of Samuel Clements in Hannibal and finds all the themes of “Huck” present in the little river town. Here’s what happened to young Sam in Hannibal before he was all of twenty years old: He ran away from home without telling his mother and wrote travel letters from New York, where in seedy Manhattan bars he was the Western “innocent”…Over and over, the idea of costume and race appealed to him. He fell in love with New Orleans and the Mardi Gras, the parade of “men, grotesque, laughable costumes…giants, Indians, minstrels, monks, priests, clowns, birds, beasts, everything”, and insisted that America’s true heart lay in that carnival.
He also had a death wish. When measles swept into town (Hannibal), he snuck out one night and crawled into bed with the afflicted Will Bowen, his best friend…He loved the water, and by his recollection almost drowned eight or nine times. Another time he dove off a riverboat to retrieve a lost hat, but swam so far downstream the town suspected he was dead, and began firing cannons over the water to coax his body to the surface. “People born to be hanged are safe in water, “his mother told him. He was a sleepwalker. He tried, at age nine, to sneak off on a riverboat. At fourteen, he got caught dancing naked by two anonymous girls as he rehearsed for his part as “bear” in a playlet to be performed at one of his older sister’s parties.
He loved smoking, role-playing, arguing, and getting people to defend what they, in other circumstances would decry…And along the way, Sam Clemens got a remarkable education on black culture and race relations in the years before the Civil War. He apparently watched his father’s autopsy through a keyhole. He watched a knife fight in which a “young California immigrant” took a bowie knife in the chest. While playing on a river island, his gang was terrified as the remains of an assassinated slave named Neriam Todd rose out of the water. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined a group of Missouri confederate marauders, then deserted and went West. These experiences and many more shaped the man who became Mark Twain. Each shows up in “Huck Finn”, forming the core cultural shape of the novel.
Much of Levy’s cultural analysis focuses on the debate raging in the 1840s about juvenile delinquency. Newspapers of the time were filled with stories of youth violence, parental neglect and child labor. Moreover, by the 1830s, “blackface” had become something new and cool, a form of potent popular culture that was simultaneously surreally revolutionary and deeply racist. Levy shows how Clements was a life-long devotee of minstrelsy and how the “popular art” of blackface seeped into Mark Twain’s book. “Huck Finn’s America” in this regard is a highly readable foray into the history of popular culture and commercial entertainment. It is easy to see where Twain got his penchant for “dialect”, tall tales, and exaggeration. Levy’s conclusion that “Huck” is about “bad boys”, parent-child relations, and race as “entertainment” does provide a new pivot around which to understand this American classic.
Explaining the “n” word is, however, another story. Levy seems as stumped as the rest of us about how to teach a great classic that is so demeaning to so many of our fellow citizens. He attempts to trace the academic arguments structuring so much of our response to this contemptible epithet, the response to it from the Civil Rights community, and his own reflections to these problems. As important as this dialogue is, the books sags through these sections.
Still and all, readers wanting to engage this American classic yet again can learn much about both Twain and America and bring “new eyes” to Huck and Jim.
May 10, 2024
Levy’s book was selected as preparation for rereading Huck, and moving on to Finn and the recently published James. Long time since that 10th grade reading assignment.
Levy offers a thoughtful and detailed historical account of the background and possible motivations of Clemens/ Twain, whose beliefs hardened with age. Describing the influence of minstralry helps place his public persona in perspective. Also recounting his personal journey - geographically and figuratively- emphasizes the spurts and starts of individual curiosity, discipline, and grit that produced the self- made Twain.
While previously familiar with Twain’s financial ups and downs, the detail provided on the Twins of Genius and the impact of George W. Cable’s potential domination of attention at time of Huck’s publication is fascinating. And also suggests a more detailed knowledge of Cable may be in order.
Throughout the book Levy addresses Twain’s struggles to address the dual issues of childhood and race, with his interpretations of varying clarity and support. It’s clear Twain’s ideals on childhood and race relations remain unmet. However, one theme that Huck suggests - that history is circular, not linear- gains support in its ties to contemporary (2015 publication of this book) events, though the final chapter’s defense seems overlong.
Banned books and all.
January 14, 2025
A good enough book on the racial elements that surround this work but doesn't quite hit "mark twain" (his non de plume was nautical jargon for the depth of the riverbed).
I was left a little unsatisfied but not wholly. I'm sure there isn't a book out there that completely explains this book to satisfaction and I give Levy ample credit for trying. This is actually a book of cultural materialism, meaning it is more a book criticizing and analyzing the culture of the era rather than the book itself. That being said, Levy thoroughly explores ideas of "blackness", taking the use of the N word a few hundred times within its pages. This book is more about how mainstream white America tiptoed around race and embraced the book Huck Finn while simultaneously embracing a white washing (no pun intended) of the African American plight between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era.
It's a quick read. I finished it in two days though I could have pushed through and done it in a n afternoon. Perhaps the uneasiness that we feel reading the N word and having to discuss it in classrooms when studying this book says as much about us today as it does about Twain's time. Worth the read for fans.
I was left a little unsatisfied but not wholly. I'm sure there isn't a book out there that completely explains this book to satisfaction and I give Levy ample credit for trying. This is actually a book of cultural materialism, meaning it is more a book criticizing and analyzing the culture of the era rather than the book itself. That being said, Levy thoroughly explores ideas of "blackness", taking the use of the N word a few hundred times within its pages. This book is more about how mainstream white America tiptoed around race and embraced the book Huck Finn while simultaneously embracing a white washing (no pun intended) of the African American plight between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era.
It's a quick read. I finished it in two days though I could have pushed through and done it in a n afternoon. Perhaps the uneasiness that we feel reading the N word and having to discuss it in classrooms when studying this book says as much about us today as it does about Twain's time. Worth the read for fans.
March 6, 2026
Highly worthwhile, incisive book on the importance of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." "Huck" wasn't written as a commentary on racial bias so much as it was sympathetic toward children, their need for play, adventure, and free expression. Huck Finn is a sympathetic character, discovering his own truth, seeking to learn on his own terms, and not just living according to the rules of his elders. His greatest discovery is his adventure and relationship with Jim, the escaped slave that Huck befriends along the way. Twain gives Huck great freedom to explore and learn about himself and the world at large, and important for all of us to keep in mind as we raise our children.
Levy's greatest contribution is his incisive analysis of youth and racism. He's incredible to read for his depth of understanding. Racism and youth aren't surmounted, but encountered again and again by generations. That's what make "Huckleberry Finn" so vital. His foreword and closing chapters are the most compelling of the book and require complete reflection. They drive his book and make it so worth reading. As a result, "Huck" is timeless for our unfulfilled needs.
Levy's greatest contribution is his incisive analysis of youth and racism. He's incredible to read for his depth of understanding. Racism and youth aren't surmounted, but encountered again and again by generations. That's what make "Huckleberry Finn" so vital. His foreword and closing chapters are the most compelling of the book and require complete reflection. They drive his book and make it so worth reading. As a result, "Huck" is timeless for our unfulfilled needs.
January 11, 2018
Levy's book is a deep read of Twain's work within the context of pre- and post-Civil War America touching on the issues of race, American society's view of children, and cultural appropriation. It neither lionizes nor dismisses Twain in some form of caricature. Instead, Levy treats him as a flawed genius worthy of our deep and critical attention. The last chapter is worth the price of this book for its insight onto how our contemporary situation repeats the half measures and blindspots of our predecessors in addressing the issue of race in America.
July 14, 2018
Full of informative, supple prose, finely researched, and with an acute sense of the time and cultural space within which the book it is about resided in, "Huck Finn's America" is the perfect companion piece for the reading of Twain's masterpiece, bar none. Referring to everything from the negritude of French poet Rimbaud, to the cultural appropriation of Elvis Presley, to Twain's own "Twins of Genius" publicity tour for the book in question, Levy's book is comprehensive, tantalizing, and an essential read. I enjoyed it immensely; it is that good.
November 30, 2020
Levy presents a great argument for why Huck Finn really isn't a wonderful piece of literature to teach to youngsters as a way to define our culture's racist history. Reading his research, the audience is left wondering how useful is it now to the American canon?
February 7, 2024
I found this very interesting. The author both praises and criticizes Twain and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
"And mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward is a classic American mistake."
"And mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward is a classic American mistake."
March 29, 2025
You know that professor who has a lot of thoughts and facts but just can’t pull them together in a coherent lecture? That’s this book. Many different ideas but they don’t gel well into a coherent argument.
August 4, 2017
America has not changed.
January 4, 2024
I don't think the author accomplished what he set out to do.
January 9, 2015
A special thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Andrew Levy’s Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece delivers an exploration of the character with a fresh new contemporary look of the American literary Classic Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. Have we missed some critical points in the classic and controversial novel over the years?
“Maybe we have misread Huck Finn on matters of race and children especially, for the same reason we repeat the cultural and political schema of the Gilded Age-because the appealing idea that every generation is better off than the one before conceals our foreboding that we live in a land of echos. And yet we read, after all these years, because the foreboding speaks to us anyway. “
There was a serious debate about how to raise and educate children in the American 1880s. Twain was contributing something more than a lighthearted boy’s book to that debate. He was thinking and speaking about literacy, popular culture, compulsory education, juvenile delinquency, at-risk children, and the different ways we raise boys from girls, and rich from poor. There was also a serious debate about the future of race relations in the American 1880s, as well. But possibly not as much a part of it as we tend to think.
Twain offered Huck Finn to a country where parents, educators, and politicians worried that children, especially boys were too exposed to violent media, that they were too susceptible to amoral market forces that made them violent themselves. The twenty-first century reader lives in a country worried about the exact same things, only with fresher media. In fact, Levy reiterates the debate over children has changed so little over the last century.
In this light, it matters that we have been misreading Huck Finn because that misreading is both wasted opportunity and metaphor for our larger failure to recognize our close relation to the past.
Richly researched, well-developed and insightful, Levy dives into controversial issues of race, violence, and parenting. Levy brings to light Twain’s focus on race was less about civil rights than the role of race in entertainment and culture. Levy reveals sides of the 1884 fiction that few of us ever noticed.
A fascinating re-discovery and thought-provoking narrative, Andrew Levy breathes new life into an American classic, giving modern readers a fresh understanding of Huck Finn's colorful world.
Recommended for fans of Twain, African and American history, American literature, and books about writers and books about books.
Judith D. Collins Must Read Books
Andrew Levy’s Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece delivers an exploration of the character with a fresh new contemporary look of the American literary Classic Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. Have we missed some critical points in the classic and controversial novel over the years?
“Maybe we have misread Huck Finn on matters of race and children especially, for the same reason we repeat the cultural and political schema of the Gilded Age-because the appealing idea that every generation is better off than the one before conceals our foreboding that we live in a land of echos. And yet we read, after all these years, because the foreboding speaks to us anyway. “
There was a serious debate about how to raise and educate children in the American 1880s. Twain was contributing something more than a lighthearted boy’s book to that debate. He was thinking and speaking about literacy, popular culture, compulsory education, juvenile delinquency, at-risk children, and the different ways we raise boys from girls, and rich from poor. There was also a serious debate about the future of race relations in the American 1880s, as well. But possibly not as much a part of it as we tend to think.
Twain offered Huck Finn to a country where parents, educators, and politicians worried that children, especially boys were too exposed to violent media, that they were too susceptible to amoral market forces that made them violent themselves. The twenty-first century reader lives in a country worried about the exact same things, only with fresher media. In fact, Levy reiterates the debate over children has changed so little over the last century.
In this light, it matters that we have been misreading Huck Finn because that misreading is both wasted opportunity and metaphor for our larger failure to recognize our close relation to the past.
Richly researched, well-developed and insightful, Levy dives into controversial issues of race, violence, and parenting. Levy brings to light Twain’s focus on race was less about civil rights than the role of race in entertainment and culture. Levy reveals sides of the 1884 fiction that few of us ever noticed.
A fascinating re-discovery and thought-provoking narrative, Andrew Levy breathes new life into an American classic, giving modern readers a fresh understanding of Huck Finn's colorful world.
Recommended for fans of Twain, African and American history, American literature, and books about writers and books about books.
Judith D. Collins Must Read Books
June 5, 2015
“Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the era that shaped his masterpiece,” by Andrew Levy (Simon and Schuster, 2015). A fascinating, ultimately quite challenging book. Levy, who is chair of English at Butler University, argues that we seriously misread “Huckleberry Finn” if we think it’s just a funny story, or that it’s deeply about race, or that it’s racist, or recounts an idyllic childhood. He says that the book must be seen as a product of its time, the late 1870s and 1880s, when Reconstruction was being destroyed by a resurgent white South, African-Americans were being unofficially re-enslaved, and the country was also awash in stories about violent, dangerous adolescent boys. He says that the civil rights debates and issues today are almost exactly the same as they were then. There are so many threads to the book that I found myself having trouble following Levy. In HF Twain was looking back to the 1840s and the first minstrel shows, which actually suggested that blacks and whites could live comfortably together. By the 1880s, minstrelsy had become harsher and more racist, and then increasingly so. Twain had been working on the novel for some years, but then put it aside. He completed and published it while he and George Washington Cable---another famous writer, a native-born Southerner who was campaigning against the South---toured the nation in an act called “Twins of Genius.” They would each read from their works, Cable polemical, Twain hilarious, to large, enthusiastic crowds. When the book was published and for years afterward the focus was on his portrayal of boyhood and education. Were these boys innocent, or were they destructive? How about “nigger”---Twain only used it as a quote; he himself called the people negroes. But ultimately the book is written for white America: blacks hate the use of the word. Levy examines newspapers of the era to show just how violent the times were, full of murders, riots, arsons, killings of all sorts. The press mostly mirrored the embedded racism of the time, often mocking blacks, at best condescending. Over the decades the novel became one about race, with Huck finally seeing Jim as a human being worthy of sympathy and empathy. By the last chapters of the books, when Levy is writing about how one reads, and what Twain meant, and whether he knew that’s what he meant, and how the country read it, I was getting lost in the academicism.
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Huc...
April 7, 2015
Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece was about exactly that, no more, no less. Mr Levy writes in a scholarly, yet colloquial fashion about Mark Twain's supposed bad boy and the world into which he "borned" him. Not having been very much interested in America pre and post Civil War, much of the material was new to me. Twain's redemptive change of heart on the abolition question, his decided dislike of the Southern anti-Reconstructionists and his successful "Twin Geniuses" tour with George Washington Cable as told by Levy give a deeper understanding of Twain's original, contrarian personality as well as highlighting important issues of the time. Levy does not idolize Twain. Neither does he demonize him for his bad temper, foul mouth or his sly tendency to slide a morality lesson under tomfoolery. Levy seems to admire Cable's more forthright stance against a South which denied its former slaves any self-regulation or true equality, but I can't be sure. Levy's even-handedness in acknowledging the virtues and lapses of both Cable and Twain make it the reader's task to decide who was wisest in his method of proclaiming an ugly truth. Both men were born and raised Southerners, both were conflicted about slavery at the time of the war, both found themselves more in sympathy with the slaves than the owners, now forced to hire what they once owned, at the end of that war. Cable grew more and more outspoken on the "Twin Geniuses" tour as Twain wrestled with two endings for "Huckleberry Finn". He eventually settled on the most unsettling:Tom Sawyer steps in to save Jim, a slave Huck has been mentored by, from hanging. But his insistence on doing it in a bookish, pointless way consigns Jim to more days in jail. When Jim and the boys are finally out of danger, Tom tells them that Jim was recently freed by his mistress and thinks $40 is a good compensation for the extra confinement and terror. The angry South may have understood the rebuke, but no indication of that was given in the newspapers on which Levy relied. In passing, it must be mentioned that nearly half the book is given to expanded notes on the providence of the text. The research, one understands, is not there to bolster the author's opinion on his subject but to shape the author's telling of the facts.
Very refreshing!
Very refreshing!
March 1, 2015
Nuanced and highly engaging look at the context and creation of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," this book brilliantly examines the complexities and ironies (etc.) of Huck Finn, especially in terms of Twain's approach to childhood and, of course, race. Focusing to a substantial degree on Twain's efforts to promote the book in his massively popular "Twins of Genius" performance-art tour with George Washington Cable (a Southerner who eventually took a more straightforward stand against racism and Jim Crow than Twain seemed to), Levy situates Twain and his literary choices in the broader culture of late 19th-century America, and seems to argue – convincingly, in this reviewer's opinion – against a reductive interpretation of, for instance (and most notably), Twain's appropriation of the accoutrements of the minstrel show and of African-American culture in general, elements of Huck Finn that have been the source of debate, in various forms, nearly since its publication. Very highly recommended, especially for fans of Huck Finn, Twain, history buffs, or those interested in the debates that continue to revolve around childhood, child-rearing, education, or race relations.
(Note: The book is listed as 368 pages on Amazon, but I'm counting 343, and a full 144 pages are notes, bibliography, and index. It's a substantial but not overwhelmingly long read.)
(Note: The book is listed as 368 pages on Amazon, but I'm counting 343, and a full 144 pages are notes, bibliography, and index. It's a substantial but not overwhelmingly long read.)
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