http://www.archive.org/details/lesaventuresdeh00twai
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.
A fitting selection for the launch of the American Library Association's annual Banned Books Week (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm) is this first French edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from UIUC's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Ranking fifth on ALA's list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2001, Twain's timeless telling of the adventures of Tom Sawyer's best friend Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, has been the target of censors since it was first published in 1884. In 1885, it was banned from the shelves of the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, when the board decided Twain's book lacked gentility, contained coarse language, and its hero, Huck, challenged his elders and told lies. Objections to the book in the last 40 or so years has focused on perceptions of racism and insensitivity due to the use of the term "nigger" in reference to Jim. However, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Russell Baker pointed out in the New York Times in 1982, "The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."
