Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But...

Unable to obtain the original here in Germany, I read Laura Miller's comments about it In Salon published on the web:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/06/huck_finn_is_not_about_race_the_real_subtext_of_twains_masterpiece/

In effect Miller encapsulates levy's thesis as follows:

In researching “Huck Finn’s America,” Levy immersed himself in newspapers and magazines from around the time Twain’s novel was written and published. What he found was that nobody, including Twain himself, considered race to be the primary theme of “Huckleberry Finn.” Rather, the novel emerged from and spoke to a society that was obsessed with wayward children, particularly boys, and most typically lower-class boys spurred to delinquency by the violent stories they read in dime novels

But later she says that levy has been fooling us all along; Huckleberry Finn is really about race. I have never been deceived and I have read the novel countless times since about the age of nine, Huckleberry Finn is about slavery and race relations. The boyhood naïveté of Huckleberry Finn is used as a foil for a certain kind of rationalization for slavery. Tom Sawyer is facile, sophisticated, knowledgeable, and more childish than Huck Finn and he represents a pseudo-sophistication of the culture which is thoroughly punctured.

I do not believe for a minute that the novel is about a boy coasting down a river, that is the excuse for the story. And I admit forthwith that Sam Clemens would be the first to have me indicted, convicted and executed for saying so. After all, anyone attempting to find a moral in the story will be shot.…

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