The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the most celebrated and the most controversial books in American literature. The celebration is due in part to its democratic empathy, good humor, and sharply written dialogue; its controversy stems from Twain’s treatment and depiction of Black Americans, particularly Jim. Though Twain’s intentions may have been good, the novel is compromised by its archaic attitudes about race, comparative even to the best thinking of its time, and by a failure of imagination inherent to the author.

Jim is written with empathy and motivational spark far in advance of other Black characters depicted by White authors in the year 1884, and the book displays an equally rare philosophical and ironized ambivalence toward slavery. However, it’s important to put the year 1884 into context. At the time of the book’s publication, the Civil War was still fresh within living memory, and while the political ramifications of that war never ended, historians often date the end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877, which saw the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, the reestablishment of Southern White supremacy, and a retrenchment of racialized anti-labor politics in the North. In the years after the Civil War, public intellectuals like Twain had a tremendous responsibility to incorporate former slaves into the economic and cultural life of the nation, both through laws and through stories.