Been There Before by Andrew Levy

Author:Andrew Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a provocative book about Huck Finn and Mark Twain is about the least provocative thing one can do. Generally, one doesn’t say anything new about Huck Finn—a fact that, in itself, is not even a new thing to observe. There are original insights in this book, or, at least, original juxtapositions of older insights. As well, there is an effort to bring arguments known within the academic community to a larger audience. That is less original, but it is important, and not at all easy. And it is a goal that fits the book’s theme: that Mark Twain and Huck Finn teach us that American history is “echoic,” not progressive. A healthy dose of humility for the sojourner in Twain’s world, then, for the problems about which he writes become your problems.

In writing this book, I was inspired by, and am indebted to, many inspired scholars and writers, especially for the Twain biographies written by Ron Powers, Fred Kaplan, Michael Shelden, Michael Patrick Hearn, Jerome Loving, Laura E. Skandera Trombley, Karen Lystra, Walter Blair, Andrew Hoffman, and Justin Kaplan; for provocative works of research and analysis by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Forrest G. Robinson, Lawrence Howe, Jonathan Arac, Victor A. Doyno, Victor Fischer, Louis J. Budd, Tom Quirk, Randall Knoper, Roger B. Salomon, Arthur G. Pettit, and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua; and for articles and essays by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Ann M. Ryan, Gregg Camfield, Stacey Margolis, Eric J. Sundquist, Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison, and many other writers and academics. I studied the analysis of the minstrel show by Eric Lott, W. T. Lhamon Jr., Robert C. Toll, J. Anthony Berret, Dale Cockrell, Karen Sotiropoulos, Louis Chude-Sokei, Saidiya Hartman, William J. Mahar, Steven Johnson, Yuval Taylor and William Austen, Sharon D. McCoy, and Henry Wonham, and the re-creations of the “Twins of Genius” by Guy Cardwell, Fred Lorch, Paul Fatout, and Stephen Railton. A deep thanks to those writers and scholars who provided perspective and historical foundation to the discussion of racial epithets, in Huck and elsewhere: Jabari Asim, Randall Kennedy, Elon James White, Sharon E. Rush, and, again, many others. I am perhaps most grateful to the authors who have had the serious conversation about children and Twain, especially Steven Mailloux, Michael J. Kiskis, Albert E. Stone, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Alan Gribben, Peter Messent, Roberta Seelinger Trites, David Nylund, Elizabeth Prioleau, Keith M. Opdahl, Victor Doyno, Forrest G. Robinson, and Beverly Lyon Clark. They deserve special tribute here. And there are many, many others. The literature on Twain and Huck Finn is simply extraordinary. The documentation for this book is nearly as long as the book, and even then, it’s not long enough.

I am grateful to the editors of the Twain Papers and Project in Berkeley, and particularly grateful for the assistance of Neda Salem at that archive, for providing copies and microfiche of many key documents. I am likewise grateful for assistance provided by the administration of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia, and Lyndsi Barnes and the Berg Collection of American Literature at the New York Public Library.

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