5 on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999.” The “Scary Stories” series by Alvin Schwartz tops the list, released in honor of the Association’s 19th Annual Banned Books Week, which runs Sept. Whatever the reason, the continuing complaints about the book have landed it as No. Though much of the debate over the book focuses on its language, other criticism takes aim at the use of the book to represent pre-Civil War America when other works - some by African-American authors - might be more appropriate in depicting America’s painful slave-holding past. She has written a book on the subject, “The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” has made numerous television appearances to talk about the subject, and has traveled around the country lecturing on the value of teaching “Huckleberry Finn” to the nation’s high schoolers. She did and the book remains on the reading list for students.Ĭhadwick is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on Mark Twain. The school board agreed to keep the book in the curriculum, but only if Chadwick returned in August to lead a workshop for instructors on how the book should be taught. In April, Chadwick was asked to mediate a debate over whether “Huckleberry Finn” should be taught to high school juniors in Enid, Okla. Mark Twain knew darn well what he was doing when he wrote “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: he was pokin’ at a beehive.Īnd for more than one hundred years, the bees have obliged, swarming out with criticism of the tale of the friendship between a poor white boy, Huckleberry Finn, and an escaped slave, Jim.Īmidst today’s debate on the book - much of which focuses on the repeated use of a racial slur by virtually everyone in “Huckleberry Finn” - is Graduate School of Education Assistant Professor Jocelyn Chadwick. (Staff Photo Justin Ide, Harvard News Office) Photographed inside the Harvard Coop, Thursday, September 21, 2000.

Chadwick is a Twain scholar and stands in defense of his work as a historical perspective on language and race, and is opposed to banning his work becuase of racial language that today is unaccepted.

Jocelyn Chadwick, professor at the Graduate School of Education, with a copy of the complete works of Mark Twain.

Huckleberry and finn