Yesterday, April 21, was the 100th anniversary of the death of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The author from Missouri was better known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain.
How do you describe such a well-traveled and versatile individual? The sum total of his life was much greater than the individual things he did.
He was a steamboat pilot, a businessman, a newspaper columnist, a lecturer and the author of some of the greatest works in American literature, which shone for their social commentary.
He is, of course, well-known for Life on the Mississippi (his autobiography) and The Innocents Abroad (a collection of letters he wrote while traveling through Europe), but mostly for his fictional works The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written in 1876 and 1884, these somewhat nostalgic stories about young boys paint a vivid picture of life in 1830s Missouri, as Twain remembered it growing up.
Every German I’ve met has read at least one of these two novels in school. But very few Americans I’ve met have read either one.
Clearly, some decisions have been made about what to teach in school. Europeans have a general fascination with 19th-century America: the wide open spaces of the Wild West, with their promise of opportunity, but also danger; the enormous social problems the country faced before and after the Civil War; and the folklore that emerged from local traditions and dialects.
Twain’s novels, which — in a pioneering move for their time — included a lot of dialogue written in dialect, certainly fit this mold.
The US, however, has a somewhat different perspective. The novels describe something most modern Americans would rather forget: life on the edge of the civilized world during a time when a lot of people had backward attitudes towards things like, oh, human slavery.
In the early 19th century, as territories were being settled and added to the country as states, Missouri was on the front line of the slavery/anti-slavery debate. In the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820, Congress agreed to a Southern demand that, in the future, as many new slave states be created as free states. Depending on your interpretation of history, this action either delayed the Civil War by 40 years or made it inevitable.
Twain’s description of Missouri under slavery, and his use of the taboo word “nigger” in dialogue referring to a character who is a slave, can be interpreted as commentary about social progress. As he did in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain made this commentary from a suitable distance in time and space.
Yet some schools and libraries, even today, find the language in the Finn/Sawyer novels too controversial. Little kids might be tempted to parrot the N-word in front of others who’d be offended. In some communities, the books are banned. In others, they are simply not taught until the university level. It’s been like this for decades.
It’s a shame. This treasure that Twain left us, that we might enjoy it and learn from it, is often talked about but seldom seen. Just as importantly, its absence gives teachers an excuse to present this period of history in a cold, abstract way — without the humor, nuance, and descriptions of everyday life necessary to see it in context.
A point for the Germans!
Footnote: When this column was originally published, I heard from an English teacher in Missouri who said that Mark Twain was indeed read in schools there and that I was overstating the case. All Americans are familiar with Mark Twain’s works, though often through summaries or film adaptations. The author was once as extraordinarily popular as he is in Germany, but this changed during the mid-20th century. I suspect that the connection to Missouri keeps him on the curriculum in that state, while other states consider the language in his books to be controversial.
