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Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece
By Andrew Levy
ISBN: 9781439186961
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 01/06/2015
Format: Other
My Rating: 4 Stars

A special thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Andrew Levy’s Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece delivers an exploration of the character with a fresh new contemporary look of the American literary Classic Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. Have we missed some critical points in the classic and controversial novel over the years?

“Maybe we have misread Huck Finn on matters of race and children especially, for the same reason we repeat the cultural and political schema of the Gilded Age-because the appealing idea that every generation is better off than the one before conceals our foreboding that we live in a land of echos. And yet we read, after all these years, because the foreboding speaks to us anyway. “

There was a serious debate about how to raise and educate children in the American 1880s. Twain was contributing something more than a lighthearted boy’s book to that debate. He was thinking and speaking about literacy, popular culture, compulsory education, juvenile delinquency, at-risk children, and the different ways we raise boys from girls, and rich from poor. There was also a serious debate about the future of race relations in the American 1880s, as well. But possibly not as much a part of it as we tend to think.

Twain offered Huck Finn to a country where parents, educators, and politicians worried that children, especially boys were too exposed to violent media, that they were too susceptible to amoral market forces that made them violent themselves. The twenty-first century reader lives in a country worried about the exact same things, only with fresher media. In fact, Levy reiterates the debate over children has changed so little over the last century.

In this light, it matters that we have been misreading Huck Finn because that misreading is both wasted opportunity and metaphor for our larger failure to recognize our close relation to the past.

Richly researched, well-developed and insightful, Levy dives into controversial issues of race, violence, and parenting. Levy brings to light Twain’s focus on race was less about civil rights than the role of race in entertainment and culture. Levy reveals sides of the 1884 fiction that few of us ever noticed.

A fascinating re-discovery and thought-provoking narrative, Andrew Levy breathes new life into an American classic, giving modern readers a fresh understanding of Huck Finn's colorful world.

Recommended for fans of Twain, African and American history, American literature, and books about writers and books about books.