Name: Huck Finn
ISBN: 9780544186989

What Hacker News says

rramadassOct 2026

People who are exposed to Mark Twain only through Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/A Connecticut Yankee/etc. works usually think of him as a "fun" author.

But he had one of the most incisive and intellectual minds of his times, which was biting in its criticisms/satire of American and the larger Human civilization. Everybody (but Americans especially) should read his set of essays titled; On The Damned Human Race for edification.

I often wonder what he would think of current-day American society and so-called democracy. He actually coined the term "Gilded Age" to highlight the covering of everything rotten/corrupt with a superficial sheen so as to sell it to the masses. If that doesn't describe today's society i don't know what does.

Read, The Lowest Animal (aka The Damned Human Race) by Mark Twain - https://www.thoughtco.com/the-lowest-animal-by-mark-twain-16...

And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – nameable as the Human Being. Below us – nothing.

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dghlsakjgOct 2022

The author already explained that the issue is that he is planning on quoting offensive language from Mark Twain's Huck Finn. If you aren't familiar, the text contains gratuitous use of the n-word.

I can totally understand the worry about getting picked up by automated moderation and not being able to appeal successfully.

If Medium has an auto-ban policy on the n-word, the author could be deplatformed, or at the very least be at the mercy of a CS rep who is paid for volume of tickets solved, not for understanding the nuance of 19th century american literature.

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stephenhueyJun 2021

While some may analyze beautiful literature into oblivion and I feel your pain, I can’t agree with you on Huck Finn. My interpretation of the intro you quoted is very different from yours.

Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62739

Even though he masterfully wove his beliefs into the underlying fabric of Huck Finn, I am sure he wished to subtly communicate important truths while spinning a really delightful tale.

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chad_strategicMar 2021

My experience with religion came via Mark Twain.

"In high school or at some point in my high school years, I read Huck Finn. There was a part in the book where Huck has to save Jim and if he saves Jim, he knows the church has taught him that he will go Hell. Huck denies the teaching of the church and saves his friend."

The following is my recollection of the book, it might not be exactly accurate but it is the way I remember it and or want to remember. Keep in mind, I read this close 30 years ago, so I read it without our current revisionist/racists history perspective. Please try to take my comments and thoughts only in the light of religion.

I do remember that reading that passage or that part in the story, saying to myself. “FTS”! I can’t reconcile this in my conscience. Religion is definitely the opiate of the masses. Look no further than the last few US elections. At that point, I disavowed any organized religion and started listening to Bad Religion.

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burkamanAug 2018

It's just about the language, and it's not just an armchair mob. Serious people have serious issues with the book. I don't think it should be banned or even removed from curriculums, but it should be taught carefully, with a lot more instruction than just "this is a great book with some bad words that we don't use anymore".

The characters are obviously racist, but the question is whether the author and/or the book are racist, and if so that needs to be called out explicitly and discussed in the classroom. Here's a good essay on it: https://www.vqronline.org/essay/jim-and-mark-twain-what-do-d...

> In the middle of Huck Finn, Mark Twain let Jim step out from behind the racist stereotype that has proven a lot harder to destroy than slavery. The effect of the ending, though, is to put him back in blackface so the whites of his eyes will show more conspicuously when they roll. The ending of Huck Finn has been recognized as a problem for more than 50 years, although almost no one has emphasized how it changes Jim’s status within the novel. Charles Neider, in a new edition that Doubleday published for the centennial, grandly chose to cut 8300 words from this Tom Sawyer section. It does go on and on, becoming the longest episode in the novel—but that is the first thing that must be noted about it. The second is how hard Twain works in it to make his reader laugh, piling up witches, rats, mashed teeth, pouring melting butter over the whole. When he went back on the lecture circuit in the winter of 1884—85, he used the Evasion chapters as the basis for his new program, and in his letters home he brags about their effectiveness as a comic tour de force, a continuous series of snappers. That, especially in view of our modern unhappiness with the ending, should be the third thing to note: Twain used the 1884—85 tour to promote his forthcoming novel, and this was the part of it he chose to represent the whole.

> [...]

> We obviously cannot say what might have happened, either in the book or to the book’s reception, if Twain had not decided to turn Huck into Tom, and Jim into a comic stereotype. We must, however, reckon the price Twain paid for that decision. Huck can’t free Jim. Jim can’t free Huck. Between them, Huck and Jim could not free Mark Twain from the pact his need for popularity forced him to make with his public’s self-protective prejudices. Twain’s own sense of remorse is only a partial compensation for his betrayal of Jim. By Jim’s definition, which is surely entitled to be definitive, the ending of Huck Finn is “trash.” It is trash, though, that we cannot afford to throw away until we have finished learning what it has to teach us about our culture’s appetites.

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gruseomFeb 2011

Fair question. It seems to me that language isn't ever intrinsically hateful; what's hateful is the intent with which humans sometimes use it. "Nigger" isn't hateful when Chris Rock uses it; arguably not when Mark Twain put it in Huck Finn either. That's one of the fascinating things about language: the minute you try to pin it down, new usages appear that escape your grasp. Often to comedic effect.

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