High School Removes *Display* of Banned Books! (For Banned Book week)

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For Twain's critics, the novel is racist on the face of it, and for the most obvious reason: many characters use the word "nigger" throughout. But since the action of the book takes place in the south twenty years before the Civil War, it would be amazing if they didn't use that word.

A closer reading also reveals Twain's serious satiric intent. In one scene, for instance, Aunt Sally hears of a steamboat explosion.

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?" she asks.

"No'm," comes the answer. "Killed a nigger."

But anyone who imagines that Mark Twain meant this literally is missing the point. Rather, Twain is using this casual dialogue ironically, as a way to underscore the chilling truth about the old south, that it was a society where perfectly "nice" people didn't consider the death of a black person worth their notice. To drive the point home, Twain has the lady continue:

"Well, it's lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt."

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Huckleberry Finn is not an imaginary person. He still lives; or rather they still live; for Huckleberry Finn is two persons in one -- namely, the author's two uncles, the present editors of the Boston Advertiser and the Springfield Republican. In character, language, clothing, education, instinct, and origin, he is the painstakingly and truthfully drawn photograph and counterpart of these two gentlemen as they were in the time of their boyhood, forty years ago. The work has been most carefully and conscientiously done, and is exactly true to the originals, in even the minutest particulars, with but one exception, and that is a trifling one: this boy's language has been toned down and softened, here and there, in deference to the taste of a more modern and fastidious day.

— Mark Twain