The Day They Came to Arrest the Book

Since its release in 1884, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been a controversial book. The 1944 biopic The Adventures of Mark Twain features a scene in which Twain’s wife and other senior advisors try to persuade him not to publish Huckleberry Finn. The movie portrays the book’s sympathetic treatment of a runaway slave as the source of their concern, as Twain’s advisors fear Twain would permanently lose his Southern readers. Northern readers rejected the book as well. The Day They Came to Arrest the Book references a real criticism from the 1885 Boston Transcript newspaper:

The Concord [Massachusetts] Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash (89).

Neither of these issues stirred the controversy Hentoff describes at George Mason High School. In the novel, the book’s frequent use of the n-word and descriptions of the demeaning treatment of Black people in the South pre-Civil War result in a group of predominantly Black parents and students calling for the censorship of Huckleberry Finn.