![]() ![]() Huck’s first-person speech is tough on translators. Good reasons exist to think it is more widely read throughout the world than Huck Finn. Still, as Rasmussen points out, Tom Sawyer‘s publication history is also massive and world-wide. Yes, the study of Tom Sawyer has been eclipsed by the massive Huck Finn juggernaut, but it is also true that Huck Finn takes on, face front, America’s gravest and most disastrous social calamity, racism. Since his idea is based on the huge scholarship accorded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in comparison to scholarly attention to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is hard to refute, but I am reminded of a statement on Moby Dick that scholarship on it had replaced whaling as the greatest industry of Massachusetts, or words to that effect. The first of Kent Rasmussen’s two forewords to Critical Insights: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer suggests that the reputation of the novel as “a literary work worthy of serious study has always been shaky” (vii). ![]()
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