Steve Hoffman wrote "although Huck doesn't not admit it, I think any fair reading of the book would be that the author of the book sees slavery as an evil." Yes. But there is also a difference between the author and the character he creates. Twain certainly could see slavery as evil. That doesn't mean that Huck does. In fact, the strength of the novel comes out of Huck's conflict between what he has been taught and what he has experienced (slavery is good, black men are inferior and dangerous vs. Jim is compassionate). It is also important to ask whether Huck Finn is, in fact, a book about slavery. It is written, after all, a good many years after the Civil War and the legal end to slavery. What we know is that Twain struggled with contemporary concerns that appear during the post-war and post-reconstruction period (he writes the final chapters of Huck Finn after his visit to the South during 1882; he goes back to fill in scenes in Huck Finn that suggest Jim's logic and the South's Walter Scottism later in the composing process). Twain uses the historical fiction of Huck Finn to address these larger concerns -- questions of morality, identity, and, yes, even race. It's also entirely possible to see Twain as investigating issues surrounding poverty and child (family and domestic) abuse. We might even think of Huck Finn NOT as a novel about the Mississippi Valley of Twain's youth but of the growing urban concerns with poverty and immigration of the 1870s and 1880s. So. The issue for me is how complex the novel is. And how our own lives affect the way we read and interpret the novel. A lot of readers want Huck to be a savior because that fits a more romantic and optimistic notion. But looking at the novel within the tradition of American realism and within the context of Twain's own time suggests a much richer and complex and challenging novel. Michael J. Kiskis Elmira College