The River, the Raft, and Race: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett’s James

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has in the last half century or more become a controversial novel largely due to its presentation of race and racism. Most readers of my generation (Boomers) read it as an uplifting example of how one person, the narrator Huck, overcomes the racism he has been born and raised in to help a runaway slave, Jim, escape from bondage in the 1840s. Many recent critics and scholars have taken a skeptical view of that interpretation. Now Percival Everett, a much admired African-American novelist, has written a revision of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious example of his project is that Jim is no longer named Jim, but James. We will spend five weeks reading both books closely and discussing not only the question of race and racism, but also the literary achievements of both books.

Text: Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mark Twain. I recommend using the Norton Critical version, 4th
edition because it contains many external sources analyzing and contextualizing the novel. You
may of course use any other edition that is convenient for you, e-books too.
James (2024), Percival Everett. Still in hardcover I believe.                        
Reading: For our first meeting, please have read Chapters 1 through 17 in Huckleberry Finn