I have the two small books of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on a shelf in my living room.
The most poignant moment is in Huckleberry Finn, where (floating on the Mississippi) the protagonist asserts:
"If my friendship damns me to hell, then I'll go to hell with him."
Looking it up...
"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up."
I've been reading an oral history of Soviet Afghanistan-veterans and unexpectedly one of them brought up this scene, talking about being a kid in school and being asked to name the most heroic literary figure he could think of. He names Huck Finn, because he knowingly accepted hell for himself in order to right an injustice and help Jim be free.
I thought that was quite an interesting pull for a kid in 1960s USSR.
One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up.
It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.
The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.
People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.
Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?
I agree in the case of Huck Finn, but if you look at the slurs in Tom Sawyer there are not many and they are mostly inessential, which is funny because Tom Sawyer functions as a racist book, whereas Huck Finn is anti-racist.
I don't believe new copies are censored? I read the book (Huckleberry Finn's not Sawyer's) as a kid in the 2010s and we read the version with slurs as well
First book I've ever read start to finish when I was in school. I remember that we've read a chapter a day in class, each one couple lines until the chapter was done.
I remember those reading circles in first grade. I got bored waiting for kids to stammer out the sentences, and read the rest of the book. The teacher at one point asked what might happen next? I blurted out the rest of the plot. The teacher angrily told me I wasn't allowed to read ahead.
I used to get in trouble doing that because I'd never look at the book.
I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.
Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!
And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.
Sometimes when I'm helping with homework, and looking for an example to practice, I find something in the workbook pages which they haven't reached yet. I find it cute when kids are nervous they'll get into trouble for having done the work before the teacher reaches that section. Of all the things to get in trouble for...!
I really, really hope they're worrying unnecessarily! I think it's better to find out early if a teacher is going to have an issue with things like that.
To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
I think one of the reasons we gave Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to kids was because it was a story easy to relate to without the gymnastics of interpretation like we'd do with Odyssey or Illiad. I could read Hamlet and understand it as a teenager, but I didn't feel like I had anything in common with him. I wonder if the same thing is happening with Tom.
" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."
How about Harry Potter?
Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.
It's been ages.. Howl's Moving Castle is the most popular, and had an anime by Studio Ghibli
Normally you'd start with the first book from the Chrestomanci series, but I think The Magicians of Caprona (1980) and Witch Week (1982) might be the best for a new fan.
It's shame she passed away before writing much more and getting the fame she deserved :(
She had a unique and cozy style and way of world building and character design, where there is challenge and conflict but not deep malice or misery, if that makes sense..
I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
The way people interact has definitely changed with the times. Whole plots of twentieth-century fiction and cinema would now be unlikely or impossible in the smartphone era, for instance.
I'm not sure about that, either. It's common to see Gen Z made uncomfortable by the intense flirtation and amorous pursuit shown in so much classic cinema, because that kind of sexual behavior is declining in developed countries (plausibly due to, among other factors, the ready availability of porn as a way to blow off steam, and the greater risk in the social-media age of getting one's reputation tarred if an advance proves unwelcome).
Cultural ages of relative sexual liberation and suppression is normal too. It's a material world so yeah there are material causes, but the way people are and respond to those pressures never change because we're still the same creatures as we were hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.
> I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
...what do you think will cause kids to be unable to understand it? They understand things like the Odyssey and the Iliad, Charles Dickens, the Bible/Torah/Quran/Baghvad Gita/etc., Faust, Don Quixote, etc. all of which were written far earlier
Ernest Hemingway famously declared in his 1935 book Green Hills of Africa that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Highly recommend Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow. I just finished it last week. Samuel Clemens' evolution from where he started to where he finished is something to be admired (just ignore his thoughts on Native Americans, how he treated his children, and his angelfish obsession).
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.
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.
Ah, brings back memories. We did a New Year's school theater presentation in the third grade, playing out the "painting the fence" scene from the book.
In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)
I have the two small books of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on a shelf in my living room.
The most poignant moment is in Huckleberry Finn, where (floating on the Mississippi) the protagonist asserts:
"If my friendship damns me to hell, then I'll go to hell with him."
Looking it up...
"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up."
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76/pg76-images.html
I've been reading an oral history of Soviet Afghanistan-veterans and unexpectedly one of them brought up this scene, talking about being a kid in school and being asked to name the most heroic literary figure he could think of. He names Huck Finn, because he knowingly accepted hell for himself in order to right an injustice and help Jim be free.
I thought that was quite an interesting pull for a kid in 1960s USSR.
One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up.
It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.
The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.
People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.
Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?
I agree in the case of Huck Finn, but if you look at the slurs in Tom Sawyer there are not many and they are mostly inessential, which is funny because Tom Sawyer functions as a racist book, whereas Huck Finn is anti-racist.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/mark-twain-racism-2-tom-saw...
Same here. Seems like this was a phenomenon in Kerala. I read the Malayalam versions.
I don't believe new copies are censored? I read the book (Huckleberry Finn's not Sawyer's) as a kid in the 2010s and we read the version with slurs as well
The passage where Tom goes to whitewash the fence is brilliant.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/tom-sawyer#:~:text=T...
Relatable to any kids forced to do chores.
I have always felt that that passage more than any other story sums up the spirit of the USA.
Ha, Ha!
You will love then Poe's essay on the "theory and practice of scams" titled; Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences - https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/diddlnga.htm
First book I've ever read start to finish when I was in school. I remember that we've read a chapter a day in class, each one couple lines until the chapter was done.
I remember those reading circles in first grade. I got bored waiting for kids to stammer out the sentences, and read the rest of the book. The teacher at one point asked what might happen next? I blurted out the rest of the plot. The teacher angrily told me I wasn't allowed to read ahead.
I used to get in trouble doing that because I'd never look at the book.
I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.
Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!
And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.
Sometimes when I'm helping with homework, and looking for an example to practice, I find something in the workbook pages which they haven't reached yet. I find it cute when kids are nervous they'll get into trouble for having done the work before the teacher reaches that section. Of all the things to get in trouble for...!
I really, really hope they're worrying unnecessarily! I think it's better to find out early if a teacher is going to have an issue with things like that.
Kids are very good at worrying about silly stuff.
They will grow out of it eventually. Most of them anyways.
Hopefully his teacher is better
Your teacher worked very hard to take fun out of learning. How dare you make it interesting! :-)
To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
I think one of the reasons we gave Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to kids was because it was a story easy to relate to without the gymnastics of interpretation like we'd do with Odyssey or Illiad. I could read Hamlet and understand it as a teenager, but I didn't feel like I had anything in common with him. I wonder if the same thing is happening with Tom.
" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."
How about Harry Potter?
Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.
Harry Potter was published before 2000, and is upped by Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci in every way.
I'd rather have one of the Baginses (not the Sackville mind you)
What book by Jones would you recommend starting with?
It's been ages.. Howl's Moving Castle is the most popular, and had an anime by Studio Ghibli
Normally you'd start with the first book from the Chrestomanci series, but I think The Magicians of Caprona (1980) and Witch Week (1982) might be the best for a new fan.
It's shame she passed away before writing much more and getting the fame she deserved :(
She had a unique and cozy style and way of world building and character design, where there is challenge and conflict but not deep malice or misery, if that makes sense..
I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
Times change but people don't.
The way people interact has definitely changed with the times. Whole plots of twentieth-century fiction and cinema would now be unlikely or impossible in the smartphone era, for instance.
Sure, the plot devices might be rendered moot by technological change but the underlying motivations remain the same.
Technology has changed, but humans haven’t.
I'm not sure about that, either. It's common to see Gen Z made uncomfortable by the intense flirtation and amorous pursuit shown in so much classic cinema, because that kind of sexual behavior is declining in developed countries (plausibly due to, among other factors, the ready availability of porn as a way to blow off steam, and the greater risk in the social-media age of getting one's reputation tarred if an advance proves unwelcome).
That feels like a broad generalization, but in either case that’s cultural. The underlying desires are still there, whether expressed or not.
Cultural ages of relative sexual liberation and suppression is normal too. It's a material world so yeah there are material causes, but the way people are and respond to those pressures never change because we're still the same creatures as we were hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I'm struggling to imagine how that's common to see
True. Just look at the graffiti in Pompeii and by Romans on the pyramids etc.
I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.
> I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
...what do you think will cause kids to be unable to understand it? They understand things like the Odyssey and the Iliad, Charles Dickens, the Bible/Torah/Quran/Baghvad Gita/etc., Faust, Don Quixote, etc. all of which were written far earlier
Ernest Hemingway famously declared in his 1935 book Green Hills of Africa that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Highly recommend Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow. I just finished it last week. Samuel Clemens' evolution from where he started to where he finished is something to be admired (just ignore his thoughts on Native Americans, how he treated his children, and his angelfish obsession).
Who is today's Tom Sawyer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gztabfs5ngA
Calvin? (w/ Hobbes)
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.
When speaking about Tom Sawyer, it's hard to not have the piece of the same title by Rush playing in your head.
Ah, brings back memories. We did a New Year's school theater presentation in the third grade, playing out the "painting the fence" scene from the book.
In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)