Huck Finn's America
Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A provocative, exuberant, and deeply researched investigation into Mark Twain’s writing of America’s favorite icon of childhood, Huckleberry Finn: “A boldly revisionist reading of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn…Twain’s masterpiece emerges as a compelling depiction of nineteenth-century troubles still all too familiar in the twenty-first century” (Booklist, starred review).
In the “groundbreaking” (Dallas Morning News) Huck Finn’s America, award-winning biographer Andrew Levy shows how modern readers have misunderstood Huckleberry Finn for decades. Mark Twain’s masterpiece is often discussed either as a carefree adventure story for children or a serious novel about race relations, yet Levy argues, it is neither. Instead, Huck Finn was written at a time when Americans were nervous about “uncivilized” bad boys, and a debate was raging about education, popular culture, and responsible parenting—casting Huck’s now-celebrated “freedom” in a very different and very modern light. On issues of race, on the other hand, Twain’s lifelong fascination with minstrel shows and black culture inspired him to write a book not about civil rights, but about race’s role in entertainment and commerce, the same features on which much of our own modern consumer culture is also grounded. In Levy’s vision, Huck Finn has more to say about contemporary children and race that we have ever imagined—if we are willing to hear it.
An eye-opening, groundbreaking exploration of the character and psyche of Mark Twain as he was writing his most famous novel, Levy’s book “explores the soul of Mark Twain's enduring achievement with the utmost self-awareness...An eloquent argument, wrapped up in rich biographical detail and historical fact.” (USA TODAY). Huck Finn’s America brings the past to vivid, surprising life, and offers a persuasive argument for why this American classic deserves to be understood anew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite its status as a durable American classic that's constantly placed on (and removed from) high school reading lists, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is consistently misunderstood and misread, says Butler University English professor Levy (Brain Wider Than the Sky). He teases out Twain's intentions by contextualizing the months leading up to Huckleberry Finn's U.S. publication in 1885, when Twain embarked on a tour to drum up sales. Though Twain's novel is both celebrated and censored for its treatment of race, Levy argues that not only do we misinterpret what Twain had to say about race but we emphasize race at the expense of the book's equally controversial treatment of childhood and 19th-century anxieties about youth violence. Ironically, Levy's analysis of Twain's racial politics is more captivating than what he has to say about Twain's views on childhood. By reading the complex and shifting semiotics of the minstrel show onto Twain's novel, Levy gives readers a sense of Twain's mercurial politics simultaneously progressive and retrograde. Levy argues that "mistaking a dark comedy about how history goes round for a parable about how it goes forward is a classic American mistake," one that tells us more about ourselves than about Twain or his novel.
