HUCK FINN'S AMERICA

Rediscovering Twain’s most widely read novel.

As Levy (English/Butler Univ.; A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary, 2009, etc.) acknowledges, anyone writing about Huckleberry Finn must feel “a healthy dose of humility” in the face of a plethora of literary criticism: His notes and bibliography comprise more than a third of this book. Yet he manages to offer fresh insights about the novel’s two central themes—children and race—by investigating Twain’s life and times and the changing cultural contexts in which the book has been read. In the 1870s and ’80s, Levy asserts, Twain was surprised by the love his children generated in him; children became his subject, and he aimed to bring them vividly to life. He responded, too, “to the pernicious twin narratives of his era—the reversal of political advances for blacks and the reframing of American children as the ‘enemy.’ ” His novel “was a bomb thrown” into a vociferous debate about children’s essential nature (were they savages? criminals? innocents?), how children should be raised and educated, and what they should—and should not—read. From the first, the novel proved controversial: Some critics saw it as a nostalgic paean to boyhood; others, that the defiant, illiterate, unrepentant Huck was an influence “not altogether desirable.” Controversy also arose over Twain’s contradictory messages about race. Although he empathized with blacks, he unabashedly loved minstrelsy and wanted “to revive the complicated subversion” of his youthful awakening to blacks’ vital culture. Twain’s capitalizing on blackness strikes Levy as analogous to today’s marketers who look to “black, Latino, and transitional neighborhoods to uncover new trends in fashion, music, and language.”

Delving deeply into 19th-century sources, generations of readers’ responses and a wide range of Twain’s writing, Levy complicates the possibilities of what the novel meant for its contemporaries and what it might mean for readers today.