Huckleberry Finn Book Discussion

The library will sponsor a discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain on Monday, April 18, at 7:00 PM. This is the fourth and final in a series of discussions of classic American fiction that the library has sponsored this winter. Published in 1885, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been one of the most popular, and one of the most controversial, novels ever published in America. Ernest Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn' . . . It's the best book we've had." Yet when it was published, the public library in Concord, Massachusetts (home of the Transcendentalist Movement) banned the book, declaring it "the veriest trash," while during the 1990s, the American Library Association ranked it the fifth most frequently challenged book in the country. (In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it has slipped to number fourteen.) Come join the discussion and see what the fuss is about.