Kathy-- I think the _Harper's_ essay you're referring to was by Jane Smiley, in which she argued that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was the book we should embrace over _HF_ because it showed greater humanity in its representation of slavery. In this estimation, Smiley is missing the historical point, ignoring when these two texts were written and what their motivating concerns were. Twain's novel was written in 1885 and thus is not primarily concerned with slavery, by then a moot point by virtue of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in the aftermath of the Civil War. But the failure of Reconstruction encompasses the period of _HF_'s composition from 1876-1884, and that tragedy--so deliciously ironized in the Phelps farm sequence of _HF_ --is arguably the main political point of Twain's novel, and of _PW_ as well. Nonetheless, Smiley's essay is instructive because, in addition to showing how ahistorical reading can mislead us, her interpretation exemplifies the persistent pull of sentimentalism and the difficulty of detecting irony even in our post-modern age. Larry Howe