THE BAD BOY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE IS IN TROUBLE again. He has always been in trouble, first with Louisa May Alcott in 1885, then the New York City Public Schools in the 1960s. Now, in 2021, Huck Finn is threatened with expulsion.
I teach English literature at Oak Park High School in Southern California, and there is a movement building here—as it is in many other schools around the country—to defenestrate Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the English literature curriculum because, it is said, the author and/or his works, are racist. What follows is an attempt to rescue this novel—along with To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and others—from being consigned to the oubliette of banned books because of the presence of a certain word.