This is a response to both Paula Baillie and John Meriwether.

There is no more appropriate Mark Twain novel than HUCK to use in secondary
American literature classes, for all the reasons that Paula mentions..

The question is whether HUCK beats out works by other authors, given the
limited time any teacher has in class.  The text that most powerfully
questions the teaching of Huck - because of the uses to which he believes
the book is put - is Jonathan Arac's "Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target"
(1997).  Against that (though indirectly) you have Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua's
"The Jim Dilemma:  Reading Race in HF" (1998).

Perhaps the best - most balanced - recent statement is by Shelley Fisher
Fishkin in "Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom" (1999).  She is talking
about teaching HF in college classes, but the point holds in spades for high
schools, I think.  Twain can be taught successfully, she argues, only if the
teacher does two things:  (1) teach the ironic structure of the book fully
(the ironic distance between Huck and the author), because college students
have a tough time with irony in written texts, and (2) give the
historical/cultural context of slavery and racism fully.  It is the latter,
of course, that takes time.
One shouldn't teach HUCK at all costs, I think, but only if one can prepare
for it well.

Dave Barber
University of Idaho