To wrap up the unit on identity, we will be reading The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Published in 1951, this story features typical, poignant, and sometimes crude episodes from protagonist Holden Caufield’s searching journey to New York City. The story begins:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.”

We will be reading the novel together in class, though silent reading will occasionally be assigned. Students will be responsible for tracking themes and symbols throughout the book (by using a tracking sheet) and for completing study questions as we read.

Complete the following poll. You may select multiple answers.

Catcher resources:

Character Map

Click for an interactive map of Manhattan

Reading guide Ch 1-4

[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_55fzfc5hd6"]Catcher notes[/goog]

Catcher Pics

[Show as slideshow]

Allie's baseball mitt

American Museum of Natural History

Field of Rye

Carousel in Central Park

Central Park, N.Y.

Duck on a frozen pond

Red hunting cap

Old-time skates

Pencey Prep

Radio City Music Hall

Museum of Art

J.D. Salinger

Custom Cover

Catcher Videos

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Each story has a slightly different approach to our topic. They are as follows:

1. Two Kinds, by Amy Tan
2. The Lesson, by Toni Cade Bambara
3. On the Rainy River, by Tim O’Brien

If you were absent, you will need to get a copy of the story from me, unless linked.

“Two Kinds” Amy Tan

Like all the stories in the book, "Two Kinds" is concerned with the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.

1. List adjectives that describe the narrator, Jing-Mei?
2. Describe the relationship between Jing-Mei and her mother?
3. Create a list of pros and cons for the mother.  In other words, list ways mom might be a little overbearing and other ways mom is trying to be a good mom.  Use specific examples.
4. How does the narrator envision herself in paragraph 9?
5. When the narrator looks in the mirror, she discovers “the prodigy side,” a face she had never seen before.  What do you think she is discovering? (19)
6. How do you think the events of the story influenced the narrators identity?
7. Think of an embarrassing moment in your life or an instance of someone controlling how you should be.  How did that moment(s) affect you?

“The Lesson”  ToniCade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara

1. On page 4, why does the narrator feel ashamed?
2. On page 5, the narrator says “And I’m jealous and want to hit her. Maybe not, but I sure want to punch somebody in the mouth.” What does she mean?
3. According to Miss Moore, what defines you? What does she think you have to do? (2nd to last graph on 5)
4. What will the narrator be thinking about when she is alone at the end?
5. What is the lesson?
6. Is Miss Moore a good teacher? Explain

“On the Rainy River” Tim O’brien

The Rainy River in Minnesota

1. Explain the financial metaphor about courage that O’Brien uses on the bottom of page 43 and top of 44. You might have to look up some of the terms.
2. Describe the importance of the narrator’s job at the meatpacking plant (p.46)?
3. What are the narrator’s choices?
4. What “seemed so impossible and terrible and sad”? (p. 54)
5. What influences the narrator? Can he escape his identity?
6. Explain the last paragraph of the story, especially the last two sentences.

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Who are you? Do you Know? This unit is designed to find the answers to these questions (well, maybe). We are all products of our experiences. The things we encounter everyday in some way shape our personality. Rarely, however, do we stop and think about our own nature. By studying a variety of materials, the goal is to identify our personality and the influences that helped shape it. Also, we need to recognize that the decisions we make are a result of those experiences.

What does Holden’s red hunting hat have to do with identity?  This will make sense later, don’t worry.

To help you think about your own Identity, complete the following “Me Map” ( Me Map)  if you did not get one in class.

This unit on identity will encourage you to think about yourself and how the world around you influences you by reading a variety of materials (essay, poetry, short story, novel). This will focus on students—how do they become who they are and how do they end up making decisions.

Who am I?

How did it become who I am?

Think about how these authors explore their identities in relation to others:

“It’s Hard Enough Being Me”

It\'s Hard Enough Being Me

Questions about Hard Enough

1. Did the author’s identity change in college? How so?
2. What do people expect of her (at college)?
3. What is the contradiction she expresses with her situation? (3rd paragraph)
4. Why was learning in college difficult for her? (explain paragraph 10)
5. The author states it was difficult when she moved to New York to define herself as “Latina.” Do you think it is good, bad, or some of each to be forced to define oneself in terms of ethnicity?
6. What conclusion does the author draw at the end about her identity?

“For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend”

by Pat Parker

the first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.

You should be able to dig Aretha,
but don’t play here every time i come over.
An if you decide to play Beethoven-don’t tell me
his life story. They make us take music appreciation too.

Eat soul food if you like it, but don’t expect me
to locate your restaurants
of cook it for you.

And if some Black person insults you,
mugs you, rapes your sister, rapes you,
rips your house or is just being an ass-
please do not apologize to me
for wanting to do them bodily harm.
It makes me wonder if you’re foolish.

And even if you really believe Blacks are better lovers than
whites-don’t tell me. I start thinking of charging stud fees.

In other words-if you really want to be my friend-don’t
make a labor of it. I’m lazy. Remember.

-from Making Face, Make Soul
edited by Gloria Anzaldua
( For the White Person Who Wants to Be My Friend)

San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990.

Identity

The act of being oneself.

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Here are the notes on literary terms, or elements, that we went over in class.  For quick reference, here they are:

Literary elements

• Plot
• Character
• Point of View
• Setting
• Theme

Literary Devices

• Tone
• Simile
• Metaphor
• Imagery
• Allusion
• Irony
• Symbolism

[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_227g5qfxwgw"]Literary Terms Notes[/goog]

For practice, download and read the following story and answer the questions (if you didn’t in class).
Three Little Pigs Wolf Version

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[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_22gvbsdq64"]Class Notes[/goog]

Raisin Study Questions

Raisin Study Questions

19.31 KB, pdf, 2 hits, 2010-03-11

US Literature II, Handouts

A Raisin in the Sun was first produced in 1959 and anticipates many of the issues which were to divide American culture during the decade of the 1960s. Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright, was an unknown dramatist who achieved unprecedented success when her play became a Broadway sensation. Not only were successful women playwrights rare at the time, but successful young black women playwrights were virtually unheard of. Within its context, the success of A Raisin in the Sun is particularly stunning.

In part because there were few black playwrights—as well as few black men and women who could attend Broadway productions—the play was hindered by a lack of financial support during its initial production. Producers hesitated to risk financial involvement in such an unprecedented event, for had the play been less well-written or well-acted, it could have suffered an incredible failure. Eventually, however, the play did find financial backing, and after staging initial performances in New Haven, Connecticut, it reached Broadway.

Compounding the racial challenges the play posed was its length of nearly three hours as it was originally written. Because audiences are not accustomed to plays of such length, especially by a newcomer, a couple of significant scenes were cut from the original production. (These scenes are sometimes included in later renditions.) These scenes include Walter’s bedtime conversation with Travis and the family’s interaction with Mrs. Johnson. In addition, the scene in which Beneatha appears with a “natural” haircut was eliminated in the original version primarily because Diana Sands, the actress, was not attractive enough with this haircut to reinforce the point of the scene. This scene would become more crucial as cultural ideas shifted.

Lorraine Hansberry–>

Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930, and was the first African-American woman to win the Best American Play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle. She was the fifth woman and the youngest American to ever have done so. She was given this award for her play, A Raisin in the Sun, which was written when she was in her twenties, and was first performed on Broadway in 1959.

Lorraine Hansberry started writing when she was a young woman. When she was 22 years old, she declared to her later-to-be husband, Robert Nemiroff:

I am a writer. I am going to write!

Her husband then later became her literary executor (the person in charge of handling her writing) after her early death due to cancer, when she was 34 years old.

When she was a college student, she wrote a piece for her school magazine which foretold the driving concerns which would form the basis for A Raisin in the Sun:

What is it exactly that we Negroes want to see on the screen? The answer is simple reality. We want to see film about a people who live and work like everybody else, but who currently must battle fierce oppression to do so.

Even so, when she had completed writing A Raisin in the Sun, Ms. Hansberry could not quite believe what she had accomplished. As described in her autobiographical work To Be Young, Gifted and Black:

…I had turned the last page out of the typewriter and pressed all the sheets neatly together in a pile, and gone and stretched out face down on the living room floor. I had finished a play; a play I had no reason to think or not think would ever be done; a play that I was sure no one would quite understand…

Where did Lorraine Hansberry get the impetus to carry forward her vision through her writing? As Robert Nemiroff related it, she “had herself as a child been almost killed in such a real-life story”4 as the one depicted in her play.

In addition to these works, Ms. Hansberry also wrote another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a novel Les Blancs, and Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays, in addition to numerous magazine and newspaper articles, and other work in progress, left unfinished when she died. No matter how famous Ms. Hansberry became, though, and no matter how much she achieved during her brief lifetime, she never forgot her commitment to carrying forward her ideals to the young people who would follow her.

When she died, her ex-husband inscribed these lines from her Brustein play on her tombstone:

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care…the why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living.

Historical Overview

Into what milieu was Lorraine Hansberry born? What was America like when she was growing up? What experiences would she have had as a student? What was this country like when she reached adulthood?

In order to understand the historical background of A Raisin in the Sun, it is necessary to understand the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision. That law changed the previous “separate but equal” status of education in the South.

“Separate but equal” meant that until the 1954 ruling, black children and White children were separated into different schools. There were no exceptions to this segregationist policy. Also, public facilities such as parks, theaters, etc., had sections and utilities segregated by race. This was because of what were known as “Jim Crow laws,” which were not real laws, but local statutes which everyone followed.

Until the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and other civil rights activity in the 1950s, it was very dangerous for people of different races to be friends. Works of literature from that time, such as Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith, depict the outrageous injustice of that time.

In addition, any black person who challenged these Jim Crow statutes in any way was subject to abuse, arrest, or lynching (being hung by a lawless mob). Heroes such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mrs. Rosa Parks, however, challenged these Jim Crow laws and “separate but equal” protocols through boycotts, marches, and other nonviolent means, which often originated in black churches.

At the time Ms. Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, then, the country was being forced for the first time to truly put into practice Abraham Lincoln’s words in reference to the Civil War freeing the slaves about a century before:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Even after the school desegregation ruling, however, it took quite some time for the schools in the South to be integrated. Children who tried to go to schools previously off-limits to them were harassed, humiliated, had rocks thrown at them, were set upon by dogs, and otherwise threatened and persecuted. Churches with predominantly black congregations were bombed, and church members, including children, were killed. Families who moved into previously all-white neighborhoods had crosses burned on their front lawns by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, and were subject to being terrorized in many other ways.

This situation occurred mainly in the South, but the North was not that much better off when it came to these kinds of injustices; they were just more subtle. It has been said that one of Lorraine Hansberry’s purposes in writing A Raisin in the Sun was to show that things were not much better in the North in the 1950s than they were in the South.

Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff said this of Hansberry’s vision:

…She had to possess a powerful cosmic sense of the magnitude of human struggle in the modern world waged by ordinary men and women. Such battles against themselves and others, against wretchedness, and against fate she believed to be of comparable worth as dramatic material to the woes of ancient kings and queens in whom grave flaws of character led to disaster.

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As this unit progresses, you will form your own notion of what the American Dream is. In class, we will also read other people’s idea of what it means. The following is from an old speech by Barack Obama:

In big cities and small towns; among men and women; young and old; black, white, and brown – Americans share a faith in simple dreams. A job with wages that can support a family. Health care that we can count on and afford. A retirement that is dignified and secure. Education and opportunity for our kids. Common hopes. American dreams…

What is unique about America is that we want these dreams for more than ourselves – we want them for each other. That’s why we call it the American dream. We want it for the kid who doesn’t go to college because she cannot afford it; for the worker whose wondering if his wages will pay this winter’s heating bill; for 47 million Americans living without health care; for the millions more who worry if they have enough to retire with the dignity they have earned.

When our fellow Americans are denied the American dream, our own dreams are diminished. And today, the cost of that dream is rising faster than ever before. While some have prospered beyond imagination in this global economy, middle-class Americans – as well as those working hard to become middle class – are seeing the American dream slip further and further away.

President Barack Obama, 2007–Read the full speach

He is not alone in his ideas of what the American dream means. Here are two items we read in class.

• Obama Dream Abridged
• King Dream Abridged

“Let America be America Again”

Hear it:

Read it:

“Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes (printable)

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Jim Crow laws made racism legal

The term originated with a traveling show in which a white man imitated stereotypes of African Americans. Later, that name was used in society. For instance, special railroad car on trains were for blacks only and were called “Jim Crow Cars.” This became the standard term for laws and acts designed to promote segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans.

Like slavery before it, people started to reject these ideas. Twain wrote Huck Finn in the 1880s, in part, as a response to the south’s effort to limit economic and physical freedom of freed slaves.

State sanctioned laws, beatings, mob violence, and lynching persisted through the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s. Supreme court said the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, a law that stated: “That all persons…shall be entitled to full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other public amusement.” Again the Supreme Court, in 1896, said in Plessy v. Ferguson that equal accommodations, even if separate, are just fine. Adding that “separate but equal” accommodations did not stamp the “colored race with a badge of inferiority.”

With government approval, all were free to limit where blacks could vote, eat, drink, socialize and educate.

For more information and images, watch the video below about the Jim Crow Museum

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Pivotal publication Survey Graphic helped define the Harlem Renaissance

Our unit on the American Dream begins with an exploration of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Renaissance (HR) is the name given to the period from the end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers and artists produced literature in four areas:  poetry, fiction, drama, and essays.  However, HR was more than just a literary movement: it included racial consciousness, “the back to Africa” movement led by Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.

We will be focusing mostly on Langston Hughes as we study the Harlem Renaissance.    His work ties in with the movement and our theme of the American Dream.   In fact, one his poems is the basis for the title

Watch the video below to get an ideas of what it was all about.

One of the essays to come out of this time was “Harlem,” by Alain Locke. It was published in the Survey Graphic, a Harlem magazine. In this essay, Locke explains the nature of Harlem and what it means to the black community. Note the comparisons to Europe’s renaissance.  The following file is the excerpt that we read in class:

View images from the era

[Show as slideshow]

We will be discussing the basics in class, but you can read more on the background of the HR here. When Harlem was built in 1904 it was designed for the upper class white community. It consisted of townhouses, luxury apartment buildings and single-family homes. The community was built on speculation, but it was not marketed properly. To the consternation of the developers, there were no buyers. So the area was opened up to the growing Black population around 1914. In the true sense of the word, Harlem was a ghetto, but in its youth it was a somewhat fashionable section of the city with a large Black, middle class population. Because New York is a port city, Blacks from the south, Africa and the West Indies also found their way to Harlem making it a truly cosmopolitan area.

Harlem grew into a center for Black culture where the creative arts in literature, visual art and music flourished. The members of the Harlem Renaissance were often called “New Negroes” because they had a newly found sense of pride in their heritage, a desire for political and social equality in their work as well as a certain love for their community. From the mid -1920s to the mid -1930s, approximately sixteen Black writers published many volumes of poetry and fiction pieces. They used Harlem’s growing popularity as “a unique opportunity to do what reconstruction after the Civil War had not done: create a positive public image of blacks as thinking, creative human beings in American society.

Harlem also became the center of the NAACP, which was founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Du Bois. At this Marcus Garvey founded time, the Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA. The purpose of the UNIA was to promote the well being of African Americans. The UNIA newsletter, The Negro World, targeted a different group from the NAACP organ, The Crisis. Unlike the UNIA, the NAACP was open to all people, colored or otherwise. In fact, there were several different white board members on the committee board (Ramparsad 274).

More importantly, the Harlem Renaissance was significant to American urban history because it brought attention to a city that was growing rapidly due to the increase in black population, and to the problems African Americans faced living in New York City.

The Harlem Renaissance artists with the power and forcefulness of their work insisted that the Black person be accepted as “a collaborator and participant in American civilization” in the words of the educator and critic Alain Locke.

Harlem newspapers and journals such as The Crisis, The Survey Graphic and Opportunity published the work of new and established Black writers. Locke is closely associated with the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. As a professor at Howard University, he helped encourage Black writers to explore themes relating the treatment of Blacks by white writers, feelings of alienation, the search for a true home, and the criteria by which African-American writing was evaluated and appreciated (Reuben 2). Also encouraged by the NAACP, many writers “created a blatant social protest trying to break the color barrier by shouting directly into the faces of hatred and unfairness” (Rosenblatt 91). To encourage and support the intellectually gifted young people, the journals sponsored literary contests that encouraged creative production and rewarded it with cash prizes and social introductions to the top writers of the time.

The Harlem Renaissance changed American culture, in general. Because the Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience, including the white book-buying market, African-American literature gained popularity. Although African-American publications like The Crisis and Opportunity published the work of their own people, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance relied primarily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. A chief aim of the Harlem Renaissance was “to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishers” (Africana). There were a number of individuals who deeply disapproved of patronage by wealthy white patrons. Historian, Irvin Huggins, denounced the writers of the Harlem Renaissance “because the intellectuals who defined it became mimics of whites, wearing clothes and using manners of sophisticated whites, earning for themselves reputations as [uppity] from the very people they were supposed to be championing” (Bascom 13). In addition, W.E.B. DuBois was critical of works such as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), for he thought it appealed to the demands of white readers and publishers.

Zora Neale Hurston, who, for a time, was part of the Harlem Renaissance inner circle, also sustained a seriously battered ego at the hand of her critics. Richard Wright, agreed with critics like Irvin Huggins. Wright criticized Hurston because her work lacked the anger that is so characteristic of his own work. He thought that her little stories were a shameful attempt to appeal to a white audience( Washington xvii).

Source: http://www.chatham.edu/PTI/Twenties/Claytor_01.htm[/slider]

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When you read a work of literature in an English class, however, you’re being asked to read in a special way: You’re being asked to perform literary analysis. To analyze something means to break it down into smaller parts and then examine how those parts work, both individually and together. Literary analysis involves examining all the parts of a novel, play, short story, or poem—elements such as character, setting, tone, and imagery—and thinking about how the author uses those elements to create certain effects.

A literary essay isn’t a book review: you’re not being asked whether you liked a book or whether you’d recommend it to another reader. A literary essay also isn’t like the kind of book report you wrote when you were younger, where your teacher wanted you to summarize the book’s action. A high school- or college-level literary essay asks, “How does this piece of literature actually work?” “How does it do what it does?” and, “Why might the author have made the choices he or she did?”

The following notes provide a definition and explanation for writing a literary analysis. Writing about literature is the only way to really learn how to do it, but this presentation provides the background.

[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_12ff395nfv"]Writing a literary analysis[/goog]

One skill necessary for writing a literary analysis is summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting.   Also, refresh yourself on quoting material (quote sandwich).

An example is presented below. We will go over it in class. Use the practice sheet to select the right quotes and create your quote sandwiches for each main idea.

Writing an Analysis

Goldilocks lit analysis practice

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[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_223g757pgg4"]Notes[/goog]

Huckleberry Finn, one of the central works of American literature and a worldwide best seller, traces the moral education of a young boy whose better impulses overcome both self-interest and the negative forces of his culture. Huck, a homeless boy whose only relative is his disreputable father, is taken in by a respectable widow who seeks to educate him. She forces him to go to school, but Huck dislikes being “so cramped up and sivilized [sic] as they call it.” His father abducts him, and Huck prefers the freedom of his father’s shack to the constraint of more genteel surroundings.

This is what we are reading.

Freed from civilizing influences and placed in the company of his father, a vicious racist who boasts of his own illiteracy, Huck seems like a poor candidate for moral growth. But when Pap Finn nearly kills the boy during an alcoholic delirium, Huck escapes and meets the runaway slave Jim, who provides him with the opportunity to make a significant moral choice. Huck has been shaped not only by his father’s view that one should act out of self interest, but also by his society’s belief that God’s law mandates slavery. As he protects Jim, Huck feels certain that he will go to hell. Nonetheless, he transcends his upbringing and learns to value essential human bonds of trust beyond his own interest. Throughout the novel the boy witnesses a variety of human corruption, pretension, and violence, but maintains his integrity through his ability to identify with others.

“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

Mark twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Author and humorist Mark TwainClemens spent his young life in a fairly affluent family that owned a number of household slaves. The death of Clemens’s father in 1847, however, left the family in hardship. Clemens left school, worked for a printer, and, in 1851, having finished his apprenticeship, began to set type for his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. But Hannibal proved too small to hold Clemens, who soon became a sort of itinerant printer and found work in a number of American cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

While still in his early twenties, Clemens gave up his printing career in order to work on riverboats on the Mississippi. Clemens eventually became a riverboat pilot, and his life on the river influenced him a great deal. Perhaps most important, the riverboat life provided him with the pen name Mark Twain, derived from the riverboat leadsmen’s signal-”By the mark, twain”-that the water was deep enough for safe passage. Life on the river also gave Twain material for several of his books, including the raft scenes of Huckleberry Finn and the material for his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Clemens continued to work on the river until 1861, when the Civil War exploded across America and shut down the Mississippi for travel and shipping. Although Clemens joined a Confederate cavalry division, he was no ardent Confederate, and when his division deserted en masse, he did too. He then made his way west with his brother Orion, working first as a silver miner in Nevada and then stumbling into his true calling, journalism. In 1863, Clemens began to sign articles with the name Mark Twain.

Throughout the late 1860s and 1870s, Twain’s articles, stories, memoirs, and novels, characterized by an irrepressible wit and a deft ear for language and dialect, garnered him immense celebrity. His novel The Innocents Abroad (1869) was an instant bestseller, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) received even greater national acclaim and cemented Twain’s position as a giant in American literary circles. As the nation prospered economically in the post-Civil War period-an era that came to be known as the Gilded Age, an epithet that Twain coined-so too did Twain. His books were sold door-to-door, and he became wealthy enough to build a large house in Hartford, Connecticut, for himself and his wife, Olivia, whom he had married in 1870.

Twain began work on Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier novel. This new novel took on a more serious character, however, as Twain focused increasingly on the institution of slavery and the South. Twain soon set Huckleberry Finn aside, perhaps because its darker tone did not fit the optimistic sentiments of the Gilded Age. In the early 1880s, however, the hopefulness of the post-Civil War years began to fade. Reconstruction, the political program designed to reintegrate the defeated South into the Union as a slavery-free region, began to fail. The harsh measures the victorious North imposed only embittered the South. Concerned about maintaining power, many Southern politicians began an effort to control and oppress the black men and women whom the war had freed.

Meanwhile, Twain’s personal life began to collapse. His wife had long been sickly, and the couple lost their first son after just nineteen months. Twain also made a number of poor investments and financial decisions and, in 1891, found himself mired in debilitating debt. As his personal fortune dwindled, he continued to devote himself to writing. Drawing from his personal plight and the prevalent national troubles of the day, he finished a draft of Huckleberry Finn in 1883, and by 1884 had it ready for publication. The novel met with great public and critical acclaim.

Twain continued to write over the next ten years. He published two more popular novels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), but went into a considerable decline afterward, never again publishing work that matched the high standard he had set with Huckleberry Finn. Personal tragedy also continued to hound Twain: his finances remained troublesome, and within the course of a few years, his wife and two of his daughters passed away. Twain’s writing from this period until the end of his life reflects a depression and a sort of righteous rage at the injustices of the world. Despite his personal troubles, however, Twain continued to enjoy immense esteem and fame and continued to be in demand as a public speaker until his death in 1910.

Huck Finn and Jim on the raft

Although regarded as a classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has engendered controversy from the start. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned it shortly after publication. In reporting approvingly of this action, the Boston Transcript noted that members of the library committee found the book “the veriest trash” and “rough, coarse, and inelegant.” The Springfield Republican found the novel “a gross trifling with every fine feeling” and “harmful.” These objections, grounded on the view that only idealized portrayals of young persons can be edifying, can be dismissed easily by contemporary readers; more serious, however, are charges that the book encourages racism.

“We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” –Huck

In 1957 New York City junior and senior high schools dropped the novel from a list of approved books because it uses the term “nigger” and allegedly stereotypes Jim. More recently, a number of court cases have been fought to remove it from lists of required reading on grounds of racism. For example, in 1982 an administrative aide at, ironically, the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax County, Virginia, stated, “The book is poison … it works against the idea that all men are created equal. . . anybody who teaches this book is a racist.”

Listen to the program “The ‘n-word” on Minnesota Public radio by clicking here. Or download a copy of the article. Radio Transcript N-Word

Some elements in Jim’s character do suggest stereotyping – his superstition, his seeming passivity and gullibility – but he is generally superior to the book’s white characters. Pap Finn’s “whiteness” stands in contrast to Jim’s color as does his vice to Jim’s virtue. Pap’s color is linked to his racism. He is white “not like another man’s white, but white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree toad white, a fish-belly white.” He gains his sense of worth by feeling superior to black men, whatever their attainments. Far from degrading Jim, Twain measures the worth of all of the other characters against him. The impact of the term “nigger” cannot be discounted, however. The sensibilities of readers may be offended by its use if they come to the book without adequate historical background: The characters’ attitudes and terminology must be measured against the times in which they live.

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