Should We Read “Huck Finn”?

The Twain scholar and Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin weighs in.
Sep 2, 2026

People have been calling Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a great American novel for more than a century. But 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 assign it. 

cover for Jim, featuring an image of Jim against a blue and yellow background

The Twain scholar and Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin compares Huck Finn to fugu, a Japanese delicacy so poisonous that a chef must be specially licensed to serve it. “If it’s prepared right, it’s phenomenal,” she says. “If it’s taught wrong, it can be toxic.” What might it mean for the book to be “prepared right”?

Read the full New York Times Magazine story

Fishkin, whose biography of Jim, the literary character from Huck Finn (1884), was published recently by Yale University Press, also spoke with Stanford English graduate student Lydia Burleson from Arcade about the process of writing the book.

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