WRH-Introduction

Introduction The Task The Process The Due Dates Evaluation Resources Student Projects

//The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn// began stirring controversy from the time it was first published in 1885, roughly twenty years after the abolition of slavery here in the United States. Ernest Hemingway called it "one book" from which "all modern American literature" came. It is today one of the most widely read and taught books in American literature. At the same time, it was widely viewed as "unrefined" and "dangerous" by Mark Twain's contemporary reviewers and is often seen as a "racist book" by moden day commentators. It is a book that has been banned, burned, **//and//** praised as often as not.

Putting all of this aside, though, it is a book that was written well over one hundred years ago, by a now dead, white, male author. It is a very important question to ask, then, in today's multicultural, gender balanced (maybe):

=Why do we still read this book?=