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Two New Jersey Assembly members want school districts to stop teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because of racist language and themes in the 134-year-old story. The book chronicles the travels of Huckleberry Finn, who ran away from his abusive father, and Jim, a runaway slave, along the the Mississippi River. It’s set in the antebellum south but was written in the early days of the JIm Crow Laws. It contains more than 200 uses of the N-word and “its depiction of racist attitudes can cause students to feel upset, marginalized, or humiliated and can create an uncomfortable atmosphere...

There is a long history of banning books both here in the United States and abroad. Books that come to mind are D. H. Lawerence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and a whole host of others. In more recent times, the Supreme Court has rejected efforts to ban books just because someone didn't like it. See Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) Here is a book that you need to buy that many in the gun control industry would like to see banned. It is called The Liberator Code Book: An Exercise in Free Speech. The book...

DULUTH, Minn. - Students taking English classes in a Minnesota city will no longer have to read two American classics or write reports about them, the Duluth News Tribune reported. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading for students in the Duluth Public School district’s English classes next fall. However, the books are not banned: They will be available in the school as optional reading for students, the News Tribune reported. The decision comes two months after a Virginia school temporarily banned the two novels after a...

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a...

Will Mark Twain’s irony of wit work for Hilary’s peccadilloes? Samuel Clemens is America’s seminal author of the 20th Century; from his pen, the American author was defined. Armed with imagination and an orator's wit, he is more well known and remembered by his pen name Mark Twain. Ernest Hemingway said of Twain: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Hopefully most readers have read some of Hemingway’s novels and Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”; since, you will...

The more vulgar the culture gets, the more squeamish the keepers of the rules. The more verbal and visual taboos we break, the greater the threat to free speech. The National Football League institutes a 15-yard penalty for a football player who uses the N-word. If he uses it a second time, he's benched. This is the word with a cruel racist history, but which is now used as a term of affection if the person of the right color uses it. It's a word heard 500,000 times a day, reports The Washington Post in a front-page story that examines...

With recent footage of black teenagers cold-cocking random strangers in a deadly game known as “Knockout,” Americans should recognize how badly our country needs a selfless voice of leadership heard in all of our homes. But until the dignified message of someone like Dr. Ben Carson becomes mainstream, Mark Twain’s classic punch to the face has always packed the power to knock some sense in to people who need it the most. Nearly 130 years after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published, Twain’s timeless lessons on race and humanity continue to offer America a remedy to racial bigotry --...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being censored; since censorship is a concept and weapon of the Left to enforce political correctness upon the masses, Mark Twain is involved in 21st century politics; when advocating or opposing the censoring of "Huck Finn," one has taken a political stance But the Right has a storied history of ceremoniously burning books that they believe are evil with celebrated bonfires. Both the political Left and Right have ink-stained hands.

Art always moves faster and more comprehensively than politics or technology. The recent DNA revelation that Michelle Obama has a redneck in the woodpile from which her family was built would only shock those who have never read William Faulkner. The Mississippi genius may have been an occasional redneck himself, but he was also our greatest novelist since Herman Melville. Part of Faulkner's genius was expressed in the many ways he addressed an understandable obsession with color and color relationships in public and private. This was because he spent most of his life in the state that inspired Nina Simone...

# 1 ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1936) (120 votes) A profound exploration of race and all its attendant complexities. Faulkner’s rendering of the Southern “class” struggle through the life of one figure, Thomas Sutpen, makes Absalom, Absalom! the only serious rival to Melville’s Moby-Dick as the great American novel. —Richard King # 2 ALL THE KING’S MEN by ROBERT PENN WARREN (1946) (80 votes) Robert Penn Warren’s book is an unqualified masterpiece. It is all-encompassing and eclipses everything else on the list. One could make a reasonable case for its being the greatest American novel ever written. Seemingly nothing...

An American English teacher has called for novels which use the word "nigger" to be removed from the high school curriculum now that Barack Obama has been elected president. John Foley, who teaches at Ridgefield High School in southern Washington, believes classics of American literature such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men should no longer be required reading for students. "The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms. Barack Obama is [president] of the United States, and novels that use the 'N-word' repeatedly need to...

Appalled by worldwide news reports that a rural Florida bridge bore the offensive name of a character in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," a veteran South Florida legislator wants public agencies to check their maps for any racial slurs. State Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale, filed a bill after seeing a Reuters news report in a South Florida newspaper that said there are 144 places throughout the country with names that use the word "nigger" in some fashion. As an example, the British wire service cited "Nigger Jim Hammock Bridge" in Hendry County, on a two-lane road near Clewiston....

Students upset with the handling of racially sensitive material in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" demanded Monday night that the Portland School Board launch sensitivity training for teachers in Oregon's largest school district. Armed with more than 260 signatures from Portland high school students, Charles McGee and Johnnie Williams Jr. criticized the board for dismissing the issue earlier this month when board member Derry Jackson asked that the book be removed from reading lists. Mark Twain's 19th-century novel about the adventures of a white boy and a runaway slave uses the word "nigger" more than 200 times. Williams, a Lincoln...

A natural skeptic, Twain was not taken by the splendor of the Holy Land. He wrote irreverently about the country’s legendary sites. At his peak, Mark Twain was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. What few realize is that it was an unlikely trip to the Holy Land that established his fame as an author. A century and a half ago, Twain traveled on an excursion with his American church group to Europe and the Middle East. The material he gathered, first published in a San Francisco newspaper, formed the basis of the humorous book that made...

After The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, the book was boycotted in some places in the United States for portraying friendship between a black man and a white boy."In its time, it was derided and censored," said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, which tracks challenges to books.Today, Mark Twain's classic - about a boy who flees his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave - is still sometimes challenged in American schools, but for nearly the opposite reason: its liberal use of the N-word...

This thread will contain the entire text of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, who was not only a socialist, and never worked a day in his life, but also believed that William Shakespeare didn't write the works of William Shakespeare. IOW, he was a deeply flawed do-nothing who happened to become (temporarily) successful in middle age."All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." -- Ernest Hemingway, "Green Hills of Africa" (1935) related: The Elderly Man...

<p>Escambia School District teachers won't be sharing "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" with students until they're in the 11th grade.</p> <p>School District officials made the decision after the principal at Ransom Middle School relayed a parent's concern over a seventh- grade class reading the racially charged Mark Twain classic about the teenage Huck floating down the Mississippi River with the escaping slave, Jim.</p>

GLENELG, Md. - A black Huck Finn and a white Jim might be OK for a high school production of Mark Twain's classic tale — but those performances had to be edited out of a C-Span talent show after the copyright holder objected to the cross-casting. ADVERTISEMENT Jay Frisby, a black student who played Huck, and Nick Lehan, a white student who played Jim, taped their performance of the song "Muddy Water" for "Close Up," a weekly show that highlights high school excellence. When the program aired Friday, the two Glenelg Country School seniors were introduced, but viewers were told...

Free Speech: No one should be surprised that the police of political correctness have finally begun rewriting literary classics. But their double standards of censorship are not about to stop at the racially offensive. The Montgomery, Ala.-based New South Books has published titles that include 2006's "Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves," described as "the tale of the ruler George W. 'Dubyiah' Fratbush, son of the earlier monarch Wimpbush, and the Fall of the American Empire." In it, Dubyiah's "lust for power draws him into a gambit to take possession of the world, together with his band of thieves —...