This is an interesting thread, and I greatly appreciate the cordial manner in which it is being carried out. The consensus so far seems to be that MT was progressive, way ahead of his time, and so forth. To some extent I can agree, of course, as I have written along those very lines in several pieces over the years. I just wonder about the hesitancy of some to admit that there are competing voices within the texts (and possibly within the man himself). Surely this is not that theoretically audacious, is it? In other words, why the hesitancy to admit that Huck Finn very likely exhibits symptoms of the extremely racist cultures of the late nineteenth century, in which the book was written and published? I certainly am not being so blunt to call HF a "racist" text--whatever that might mean--but I certainly think one can underestimate (or simply overlook) elements of the book that reveal the culture in which it was penned (a largely racist culture). It is pretty hard for any of us to completely overcome our native cultures. On a related note -- I noticed that James McPherson's review of the new book on Lincoln and Douglass got attacked in the new issue of the New York Review for seemingly underplaying Lincoln's own tendencies to act and speak in typically mid-nineteenth-century ways toward African Americans. I see these cases as rather similar--insofar as both figures, progressive though they surely were, were still revealing symptoms of an extremely biased and stubborn cultures. Is that so hard to admit? Dr. Harold K. Bush, Jr., Associate Professor Saint Louis University St. Louis, MO