The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • Many consider it the greatest American novel. • Ernest Hemingway wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” • Many people have also denounced the book for its usage of racially charged language.

3. Controversy • Huckleberry Finn (1885), was met with outright controversy in Twain’s time but is now considered one of the first great American novels. • The use of the vernacular causes the book to be banned in some schools up to this day. • The “N-word” is often used to describe Jim, as well as other slaves. • If the novel uses this language, what is the purpose in reading such a book?

4. Caution • Any students who do not treat the material (especially the racially charged material) with respect will be asked to leave class. • You will be given an independent study unit. • This unit will be more rigorous and will require much more of your time. • If at any time you feel someone is not being appropriately respectful or you are having a problem with the racially charged language in the novel, please come see me before or after school.

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • It is both a satire and an adventure novel. • It uses a backdrop of colorful depictions of Southern society. • It follows Huck Finn, the son of an abusive alcoholic father, and Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, who decide to flee on a raft down the Mississippi river to the free states. • Their river raft journey has become an oft-used metaphor of idealistic freedom from: • oppression • broken family life • racial discrimination • social injustice

6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • A novel about one boy’s education and growth. • Moral (ideas of freedom and slavery) • Intellectual • Emotional • These 3 are not autonomous, rather they influence each other in various intricate ways. • The formation of the conscience will be linked to Huck’s growth. • Where is the critical point of Huck’s growth or transformation?

7. Biography • Mark Twain [pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), quintessential American humorist, lecturer, essayist, and author. • Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on 30 November 1835, the sixth child born to Jane Lampton (1803-1890) and John Marshall Clemens (1798-1847). • In 1839 the Twain family moved to their Hill Street home, now the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum with its famous whitewashed fence, in the bustling port city of Hannibal, Missouri.

8. Biography • An important part of a river pilot’s craft is knowing the waters and depths, which, for the mighty Mississippi and her reefs, snags, and mud are ever changing. To ‘mark twain’ is to sound the depths and deem them safe for passage, the term adopted by Clemens as his pen name in 1863. • The second novel in his Tom Sawyer adventure series, Huckleberry Finn (1885), was met with outright controversy in Twain’s time but is now considered one of the first great American novels.

9. Biography • Missouri was one of the fifteen slave states when the American Civil War broke out, so Twain grew up amongst the racism, lynch mobs, hangings, and general inhumane oppression of African Americans. • Mark Twain grew to despise the injustice of slavery and any form of senseless violence.

10. Biography • Though he never renounced his Presbyterianism, he wrote many pieces seen as irreligious. • 2 works of Twain that were seen as irreligious are: • His article “The War Prayer” (1923) • “in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause” • This was Twain’s condemnation of hypocritical patriotic and religious motivations for war. • It was not published until after his death because of his family’s fear of public outrage, to which it is said Twain quipped “none but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.” • His satirical short stories Letters From Earth (1909) • “Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm.”

11. Biography • Twain was well known for his sense of humor. • Twain is a master in crafting humorous verse with sardonic wit, and though with biting criticism at times he disarms with his renderings of colloquial speech and unpretentious language. • He is the source of numerous and oft-quoted witticisms and quips including:

12. Twain Quotes • “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” • “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away.” • “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” • “Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” • “Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.” • “I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.”

13. Twain’s Death • A prolific lecturer and writer even into his seventy-fourth year, he published more than thirty books, hundreds of essays, speeches, articles, reviews, and short stories, many still in print today. • Mark Twain died on 21 April 1910 in Redding, Connecticut. • Rests in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Livy’s hometown of Elmira, New York, buried beside her and the children. • Twain’s Final written statement: • “Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all—the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.”