Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn . Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"—satire in an African-American vein—when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well—but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.
Author
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a Professor of English, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Issues of gender figure prominently in her most recent monograph, Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan 2009), which was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice; in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, which she co-edited in 1994 (Oxford UP); and People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, which she co-edited in 1996, (Wisconsin UP). Gender issues are also central to much of her work on Mark Twain including the Historical Guide to Mark Twain, which she edited in 2002 (Oxford UP) and to her edition of the previously unpublished gender-bending play, "Is He Dead?" A New Comedy by Mark Twain, which she published in 2003 (University of California Press) and helped produce on Broadway in 2007. She has published articles on women writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Tillie Olsen, and was a co-founder of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society, which is still going strong after 20 years. She has served as President of the American Studies Association and is a Founding Editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Current research interests include feminism and American literature; what we can learn from the first four decades of Ms. Magazine; the intersections between public history and literary history; and transnational perspectives on American literature. (from http://gender.stanford.edu/people/she...)
