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Article: Huck at 100. (Huckleberry Finn)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- August 31, 1985
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1985 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Ever since it was published, exactly one hundred years ago, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been a target of moral disapproval. Many of the novel's first reviewers found it disturbing and offensive. They called it, among other things, vulgar, inelegant, ungrammatical, coarse, irreverent, semi-obscene, trashy and vicious. The library in Concord, Massachusetts, promptly banned it, but the book soon won the affection of a large audience, and during the next fifty years critics, scholars and writers succeeded in rescuing it from the mincingly refined standards of what George Santayana aptly named "the genteel tradition." In the 1930s Ernest Hemingway ...