Huck Finn: Should it be taught in American Literature?
Throughout the years, few books have been as highly debated and criticized as Mark Twain's 1885 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The book's controversies are still heavily debated today. Many schools have gone as far as to ban this book from high school reading lists, despite its strong display of realism. However, this novel is a historical piece of literature and should not be banned from the classroom because its contents are merely a part of American History.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has not only been debated in recent years; it was also criticized when the book came out. The book was banned from the Concord Library the very year of its publication (Zwick 1). The primary debate dealt with the language, or dialect, the book was written in. Because Twain elected to tell the story in Huck's own words, the dialect was that of an illiterate village boy, raised by the town drunkard (Matthews 2). Huck's comments are his own rude, ignorant, sharp comments and not the comments of an intellectual writer.
…
