I will have to read Jane Smiley's, in criticism of _The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn_, before I can address this issue. I am quite busy now but
will get to it.  My daughter, Dana, is on this list and she can address this
quite well from a historical perspective as well as a literary one.  She is
a history instructor.  I have been an English instructor (Lit and Creative
Writing) for many years.

I will say I am more than a little tired of the inability of so many to read
and/or teach Huck in the context of his times.  The malignancy of political
correctness invades academe and literary circles all too easily. It now
contaminates the minds of the young.

I will be interested in seeing how Ms. Smiley defines her terms.  Certainly
Stowe can't be compared to Twain at a literary level.  Certainly Twain
wasn't the Upton Sinclair of his time.  While Twain was quite able to write
"local color" type stories with dialect as Stowe did, his reasons were quite
different and in Huck he moved even beyond himself.  Huck and Huck's
humanity, the issues of the human heart that so troubled Twain--these are
all there--as well as the confusion about identity and the ability of Huck
to grow into an adult world without sacrificing his very being. Stowe, on
the other hand, wrote of reform, morality, domesticity.  She was not a
storyteller nor did she have any interest in the art of story telling.

Finally, Huck Finn is clearly an antiracist book and I wish writers, readers
and teachers who think otherwise would catch a clue, learn to read and learn
to think.

Meredith S. Whaley