Should We Read ‘Huck Finn’?

People have been calling Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” a great American novel for more than a century. Ernest Hemingway said that this story of a young white boy and an enslaved Black man floating on a raft down the Mississippi River was the very root of all American literature. “There was nothing before,” he wrote. “There has been nothing as good since.”

Did you read “Huck Finn” when you were young? I did, a long time ago at a fancy prep school in New York City, and if there were any discussions of the racial slur that shows up in it more than 200 times, I don’t recall them. The book was cast as satire, an important commentary on the horror of slavery, a meditation on comp***ion and irony. It sure was uncomfortable, though, when the teacher had us read p***ages from the book aloud.

Beware!

In 2026, many students are upset by the slurs, and many educators are wary of a book that uses them and that could lead to job-endangering conversations, so they simply don’t ***ign it. For The New York Times Magazine today, the literary critic Ruth Franklin asks how — or whether — the novel should still be taught. She quotes a Twain scholar who compares “Huck Finn” to fugu, a Japanese fish so potentially poisonous that sushi chefs must acquire a license to serve it. “If it’s prepared right, it’s phenomenal,” the scholar said. “If it’s taught wrong, it can be toxic.”

So what might it mean, Franklin asks, for “Huck Finn” to be prepared right?

Her answer, in part:

Over the past few years, I’ve been speaking to teachers and students who believe that “Huck Finn” still has a necessary place in the cl***room, because it is uniquely able both to convey the structures of racism embedded in American society and to model how prejudice can be overcome. The book provides its own master cl*** in critical thinking; as Toni Morrison wrote in an admiring introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition, “The brilliance of ‘Huck Finn’ is that it is the argument it raises.”

That word, though! “No student wants to hear it,” one college professor told Franklin. “It’s a form of violence.”

And hear it they do. Franklin spent some time in a private school in Washington, D.C., where Samantha Goodwin, a white teacher, brought up Huck’s derogatory language about Black people in one of her cl***es:

I could see the discomfort on some students’ faces. Finally, a white student responded. “It’s supposed to anger you,” he said. “You feel like Huck has been taught that Black people aren’t human.”

“You’re speaking nicely to the power of Huck as narrator,” Goodwin responded. “He doesn’t have the ability to take the next step and say: ‘Wait a second. Why did I believe that?’ But we get angry.”

Which is fugu, I guess, prepared correctly: experiencing the novel emotionally while also appraising its critique of racism, and how that critique might fall short today. It matters when novels get us angry — and when they make us think.

Yes, but …

Franklin worries that such an approach isn’t really scalable, at least outside elite schools. “It’s easy to see how the social dynamics could spin out of control in a cl***room led by a teacher with less experience or skill or fewer resources,” she writes.

Moreover, it’s not as if all students will come around to understanding the value of the novel anyway. At the end of every school year, Goodwin, the Washington teacher, asks her students in an anonymous survey whether the novel should continue to be taught. Some say no. “It’s just racist,” one of them responded.

In 2011, one publisher printed an edition of the novel that omitted the slur. Black and white academics debated its merit for The Times’s opinion pages that year. Paul Butler, a Black law professor, recalled suffering through “Huck Finn” in high school and listening to his teacher’s tortured explanations of how the slur didn’t really mean the slur, “or meant it ironically, or historically, or symbolically,” he wrote. “Whatever. I could live my whole life fine if I never read that book again.”

Matchmaking gone wrong: India’s marriage industry is full of scams. In one m*** wedding, dozens of grooms showed up — but the brides didn’t.

Hayden Panettiere’s battles: In the year before the actress’s death, she struggled to walk at times and worked to disentangle herself from an ex-boyfriend who had abused her. Read more here.

Metropolitan Diary: One more kiss for good measure.

TODAY’S NUMBER

3,500

— That is about how many oak trees in England are thought to be more than 600 years old. They’re suffering badly this year because of extreme temperatures and drought. Let’s meet a few of them.

SPORTS

W.N.B.A.: Enes Kanter Freedom, the former NBA player who has gained notoriety for his vocal opposition to transgender athletes’ competing in women’s sports, was ejected from the Sky-Fever game yesterday. He was sitting courtside and had a confrontation with the Chicago guard Natasha Cloud. (No transgender athletes play in the W.N.B.A.)

Tennis: Coco Gauff almost played a perfect match last night in the Cincinnati Open final.

Soccer: Diego Maradona’s “hand of God” ball, the Adidas Azteca ball he used to score two of the most famous goals in history in the 1986 World Cup, was sold for $3.35 million.

Here’s a lovely thing to cook on a Monday: the poached chicken you’ll use to make Julia Moskin’s stellar chicken salad on Tuesday. While it’s steeping, you can make yourself an omelet for dinner, or order in pad Thai.

SYMBOLOGY

I don’t know about where you live, but the streets and sidewalks of New York City, my hometown, are a virtual gallery of spray-painted arrows, glyphs and symbols — mysterious notations by unknown authorities.

My colleague Michael Kimmelman, a critic who writes about cities, has been thinking about them all summer, working with Tom Wilson, a photographer, to doblockent what Michael calls “the language of a city at work.” They’re a guide to the world that pulses below the asphalt and concrete.

Read this key to what they mean.

More on culture

• The line between good entertainment and bad entertainment is surprisingly flexible, writes Maya Salam, who anchors Times coverage of movies that are so bad they’re good. Consider “Point Break,” Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 surf-and-crime thriller starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze.

• Iceland is one of the world’s safest countries. With a population of under 400,000, it averages around four murders per year. In Iceland’s fiction, though, murder is everywhere.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Enjoy these beautiful photographs made by the Italian sailing photographer Carlo Borlenghi. They accompany his obituary. Borlenghi died this month at 70.

Turn envy into insight and motivation with these tips from psychologists.

Use a white-noise machine to mask all the sounds that keep you up at night — including the ones inside your head. The somnambulant gadget inspectors at Wirecutter found the best ones.

Find good culottes. (This was the most clicked link in The Morning yesterday.)

GAMES