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