Recommended Criticism for Huckleberry Finn

"The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.... All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." -- from Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa (1934)

Text and Sources:

• Huck Finn Homepage (UVA)
• Sources and Pretexts for Huckleberry Finn (UVA)

The Huck Finn Controversy (PBS)

• The N- Word (OED)
• Toni Morrison, Introduction From The Oxford Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2009)
• Jane Smiley. "Say It Ain't So, Huck." Harpers  (Jan. 1996)
• Why We Don't Read Chapters Thirty-Four to Forty-One: "Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer" by Nick Gillespie in Reason Online (Feb 2006)

Backgrounds:

The Psychology of the Old South:

• W.J.R. Cash, The Mind of the South (1948) Chapter 2, “Of an Ideal and a Conflict”

Southwestern Humor:

• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) XIII. The South and the Myth of the Garden
• W. J. Cash, "Genesis of the Southern Cracker" The American Mercury (1935)
• Comic Anti-Heroes in Southwestern Literature (Angeline Price's Project) (UVA)
• Southwestern Humor: Criticism and Defense of an American Character (UVA)
• (Story Archive)
• Thomas Bangs Thorpe, The Big Bear of Arkansas (1854)
• Davy Crockett, Bear Hunting in Tennessee (1834)

Criticism:

• Robert C. Evans, "The Trickster Tricked: Huck Comes Out of the Fog in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (2010)

• Pettit, Arthur G.,  “Mark Twain, the Blood-Feud, and the South” The Southern Literary Journal