Was Huck Black?

Published in 1884, Huckberry Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did it come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelly Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to…