Acknowledgments

Many people helped make this book happen, and I’m delighted to be able to express my gratitude to them here.

This book would not exist had I not gotten a phone call two years ago from Henry Louis Gates Jr. inviting me to write it for the new series on Black Lives that Yale was launching with three outstanding scholars at its helm: Skip himself, along with David Blight and Jacqueline Goldsby. That phone call turned my research agenda—and my life—completely upside down, and I am very glad that it did! It is an honor to a part of an enterprise led by scholars I so greatly admire. I am grateful to Skip Gates not only for this opportunity but for having been such a font of support and good advice—as well as a dear friend—for so many years.

And I am incredibly fortunate that Yale University Press invited Robert Paul Lamb to be a reader of my manuscript. He was the perfect choice. His remarkably insightful, meticulous, erudite, and astoundingly detailed comments were enormously helpful and shaped every chapter of the book, as well as its structure, in myriad ways.

My editor at Yale, Jessie Kindig, was the kind of editor scholars dream of but rarely get. She offered astute page-by-page suggestions informed by her deep knowledge of both history and literature that made this a much better book. Her sense (which Twain would have appreciated) of the importance of using the right word and not its second cousin informed all of her edits. I am greatly in her debt. I am also grateful for the help that Yale’s Ash Lago and Ann-Marie Imbornoni gave in preparing the manuscript and the extra distance Ash went to secure photographs.

I am still amazed by the generosity of two friends and colleagues who volunteered to read my manuscript in its entirety—Arnold Rampersad, with whom I coedited Oxford’s Race and American Culture book series for a decade, and Hilton Obenzinger, with whom I once I cotaught a course on Mark Twain. The guidance they provided was invaluable.

This book builds on the work of a group of stellar scholars and writers who have helped me think through issues at the core of this book and whose friendship I value greatly. Discussions with the late Ralph Wiley (z”l) in person in Austin, Baltimore, New York, Stanford, and Washington, DC, and on email and in letters helped set in motion for me approaches to Huckleberry Finn that culminated in the book at hand—approaches that were also explored in groundbreaking ways by David L. Smith, Jocelyn Chadwick, and Terrell Dempsey. Conversations with David Bradley helped clarify my thinking on a broad range of issues: with patience and his trademark iconoclasm he helped give me the courage to grapple with tough topics.

The “Explanatory” with which this book opens was a special challenge. Although it is just four paragraphs long, those paragraphs are filled with land mines. I was fortunate, indeed, to have a group of scholars and friends whose judgment I trust weigh in suggesting edits, proposing links, and helping those paragraphs hit their mark without exploding en route. I thank Lisa Cardyn, Harry Elam, Michele Elam, Kevin Gaines, Skip Gates, Bob Lamb, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Lerone Martin, Nina Morgan, Hilton Obenzinger, Carla Peterson, Jessica Schairer, Lauri Scheyer, Sam Stoloff, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Rafia Zafar for their great suggestions. (But any problems in the final version that appears in the book are on me, not them.)

Chapter 1, “Contexts and Conditions,” benefited from conversations with my colleague Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh and was informed, as well, by conversations I had in years past with the late Sterling Stuckey (z”l) and the late Robert Farris Thompson (z”l). Bill Ferris introduced me in graduate school to the importance of paying serious attention to the folk beliefs that figure prominently in this section. Faye Dant, founder of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, an important Black history museum in Hannibal, Missouri, and author of Hannibal’s Invisibles (2024), has long been a source of inspiration, and never more so than when I was writing this book. She had an important influence on this chapter.

Chapter 2, “Myths and Models,” is indebted to the late Charles T. Davis (z”l), who told me with a knowing smile back in graduate school that I had to read “A True Story” (I’m so very glad I took his advice!). My many visits to the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, helped me understand Twain’s special relationship with George Griffin and his appreciation of the work of Charles Ethan Porter, and my many visits to Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York, helped me appreciate the scene where Twain interacted with both Mary Ann Cord and John T. Lewis. I am grateful to the staff of both institutions for preserving and celebrating the memory of these individuals. A visit to Jim’s Journey in Hannibal gave me the opportunity to learn more about Daniel Quarles and meet one of his descendants.

Chapter 3, “The Debates,” was shaped by what I learned from three brilliant writers no longer with us whom it was my pleasure and honor to know: Hal Holbrook (z”l), Ralph Ellison (z”l), and Toni Morrison (z”l). Each of them indelibly influenced my understanding of what mattered most about Twain. Their encouragement and support of my work meant the world to me. A number of wonderful fellow Twain scholars and friends who have passed on also left their mark on this chapter—including Louis Budd (z”l), Vic Doyno (z”l), and Jim Miller (z”l). My research assistant at Stanford, Constantia Katerina Georgiou, made key contributions to this chapter, as well as to chapter 5, and I am grateful for her excellent help.

Chapter 4, “Jim’s Version: An Interpretive Exercise,” was inspired in large part by my conversations over the years with Ralph Wiley, whose unproduced screenplay and whose dedication to the project of letting us see the world through Jim’s eyes opened up new perspectives on familiar terrain. Arnold Rampersad, Hilton Obenzinger, Jessie Kindig, Myrial Holbrook, and the inimitable Bob Lamb had perceptive responses that improved the final result.

Chapter 5, “Afterlives: Jim on Stage and Screen,” benefited greatly from R. Kent Rasmussen’s willingness to read it in manuscript, offering corrections and helpful advice based on his encyclopedic knowledge of film adaptations of Twain’s works (I regret that limits of space required me to cut a discussion of the portrayal of Jim by one of his favorite actors, Brock Peters). I owe a debt to Cassio de Oliveira for having introduced me to the two Soviet films I discuss in this chapter and for having pointed me toward useful sources. Lina Belitski translated Russian title cards for me. Ingrid Gessner and Alfred Hornung both offered helpful insights into the cultural context of the two German films I discuss. I am grateful to playwright and director Edward Morgan for having invited me to see a production of his play Sounding the River (Huckleberry Finn Revisited) in Milwaukee in 2001 and participate in a symposium about it, and for having shared the unpublished script with me, allowing me to quote from it in this book—as well as for the extended conversations we had about it on email. I thank Mike McKee of WTTW in Chicago for giving me access to his station’s Emmy-winning recording of the Goodman Theatre’s production from 1985 of Huckleberry Finn featuring Meshach Taylor. I am also grateful to Olamide Udoma-Ejorh, a Lagos-based city planner, for having responded to my query about whether the street in Lagos was, in fact, named for Felix Imoukhuede and for having gone the extra distance in locating his cousin, Oseomoje Imoukhuede, who helped me learn what Felix Imoukhuede did after starring in a Soviet film as a graduate student.

Chapter 6, “Afterlives: Jim in Translation,” is deeply indebted to the talented colleagues with whom I had the privilege of coediting a Special Forum in the Journal of Transnational American Studies on “Global Huck”: Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Ronald Jenn, Holger Kersten, and Selina Lai-Henderson. I also thank the outstanding contributors to that Special Forum, whose research figures prominently in this chapter: Veronica Channaut and Ronald Jenn (who wrote on French versions), Behnam Fomeshi (on Persian versions), Miguel Sanz Jiménez (on Spanish versions), Winston Kelley (on German versions), Margarita Marinova (on Russian versions), Vera Lucia Ramos (on Brazilian Portuguese versions), and Seema Sharma (on Hindi versions), as well as two stellar translators featured in the special forum: Hamada Kassam (Arabic) and An-chi Wang (Chinese). Ronald Jenn and Judith Lavoie were gracious enough to read this chapter in manuscript. Ramit Goyal identified translations of which I had not been previously aware in Punjabi and Gujarati. I am grateful to the following for having examined versions in languages I do not read and for having done their best to answer questions I had about them and provide me with useful information about them: Teresa Alves (Portuguese), Teresa Cid (Portuguese), Aruni Kashyap (Assamese), Eitan Lev Kensky (Yiddish), C. Ryan Perkins (Urdu), and Chris Suh (Korean). I thank Amel Fraisse for all she did to help identify translations in underresourced languages for our work together on the Rosetta Project. Conversations with my colleagues on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Transnational American Studies helped me appreciate the importance of the transnational perspectives on American culture that were key to chapters 5 and 6. I thank Erika Doss, Kevin Gaines, Alfred Hornung, Hsuan Hsu, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Nina Morgan, Jennifer Reimer, Brian Russell Roberts, Greg Robinson, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Pia Wiegmink—as well as Vanessa Evans, Sabine Kim, Selina Lai-Henderson, Mahshid Mayar, Aiko Takeuki-Demirci, and Mai Wang—for all they’ve taught me.

Chapter 7, “Afterlives: Jim in the High School Classroom,” relied heavily on the willingness of John Pascal to share the “secret sauce” that makes him such an effective teacher as well as the wonderful papers and exams that his students at Seton Hall Preparatory School wrote—papers and exams that were impressive, engaging, and a genuine pleasure to read. I thank his students for giving me permission to quote from them, and I’m immensely grateful to John for his Herculean efforts to get signed releases from each of them, including students who had graduated. I also thank his wife, Nelly Patricia Pascal, for having scanned all their releases and gotten them to us as promptly as she did. Conversations with John Pascal reminded me of how lucky I was to have had an equally dedicated teacher myself when I was in high school, the late Anthony Arciola (z”l), the Staples High School teacher who introduced me to Huckleberry Finn. Julia Rosenbloom was good enough to reflect on her high school experience with the novel years ago, and I remain in debt to her for that.

A conversation with Min Jin Lee prompted me to write the Afterword and brilliantly clarified for me what my aspirations in this book had been.

The “Appendix: Notes for Teachers” was shaped at its core by my students at Stanford—and earlier at the University of Texas at Austin and at Yale. They taught me to appreciate the challenges of grappling with the gnarly legacies of racism in American culture and their impact on how we understand Mark Twain. The Appendix also reflects things I learned from colleagues who joined me in making presentations for high school teachers and local communities around the country about Huck Finn and/or theatrical adaptations of it (David Bradley in Dallas, Greenwich, Hartford, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Stanford; Jocelyn Chadwick in Dallas, Seattle, and Stanford; and Hilton Obenzinger in Stanford). It also benefited from my discussions with teachers who participated in the webinar I conducted for the National Humanities Center and from what I learned teaching a course at Stanford with my esteemed colleague Allyson Hobbs on “Race and Reunion: Slavery and the Civil War in American Memory” for many years (and an earlier version of the course that I taught with Bryan Wolf). I am enormously grateful to Cole Wiley for giving me permission to reprint scenes from his father’s screenplay in the Appendix to this book. I also want to thank James W. Leonard, editor of the Mark Twain Circular, for updating the link to my article about Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn that first appeared in the Circular in 1999. Sam Stoloff, my agent, is always a source of good advice and guidance. Robin McClish managed to be miraculously on call to solve the innumerable computer problems I had while writing this book. Laura Daly and Laura Jones Dooley provided expert copy editing. Barry Moser graciously let me use his stunning illustrations.

My friend and neighbor Michael Keller runs the best university library on the planet, and without the assistance of the spectacularly effective interlibrary loan department at Stanford, as well as Stanford’s American literature and American history curators, Rebecca Wingfield and Ben Stone, this book would look very different. I am also grateful to my Yale classmate Karen Lawrence for making the Huntington Library such an inviting place to do research; the Huntington’s rare manuscripts collection was important to chapter 5, and the library’s excellent collection of critical works about Twain played a key role in my research for chapter 3. I am grateful to my longtime friend Robert H. Hirst for his stellar stewardship of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the Bancroft Library, UC-Berkeley, and for welcoming me and my students every year; the Project’s excellent collection of translations and secondary sources was very helpful to my research for this book. Mark Twain Project Online is a superb boon for scholars and was also essential to my research.

Many colleagues, friends, and former students offered feedback, encouragement, and helpful leads at a number of points as I incubated research that became this book: Molly Antopol, Terri Apter, Mita Banerjee, Michele Barry, Dorothy Bender, Adrienne Bitar, David Bradley, Jørn Brøndel, Lisa Cardyn, Gordon H. Chang, King-kok Cheung, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Joyce Cohen, Steve Courtney, Laura Daly, Mark Dawidziak, Jodi DeBruyne, Cassio de Oliveira, Michele and Harry Elam, Bill Ferris, Estelle Freedman, Maurene Fritz, Ingrid Gessner, Brian Goodman, Benjamin Griffin, Ina Habermann, Robert H. Hirst, Allyson Hobbs, Alfred Hornung, Mallory Howard, Hsinya Huang, Ronald Jenn, Gavin Jones, Van Jordan, Rose Hsiu-li Juan, Clara Juncker, James Kardon, Michael Keller, David Kennedy, Bob and Nan Keohane, Selina Lai-Henderson, Paul Lauter, Judith Lavoie, Carol Lawrence, Min Jin Lee, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Jay Lipner, Kevin Mac Donnell, Lerone Martin, Elaine Tyler May, Nina Morgan, Patricia Parker, Carla Peterson, Jean Pfaelzer, Peggy Phelan, Beth Piatote, Ato Quayson, Vaughn Rasberry, Kent Rasmussen, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jon Rieder, Brian Russell Roberts, Greg Robinson, Jessica and John Schairer, Lauri Scheyer, Matt Seybold, Yuan Shu, Gail Slocum, Mitch Slomiak, Werner Sollors, Chris Suh, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Cole Wiley, Nathaniel Williams, Richard Yarborough, Connie Young Yu, and Rafia Zafar. Also Debbie Bernick, Mary Chitty, Meg Custer, Cornelia “Nene” Emerson, Alexis Krasilovsky, Anne Magoun, Becky Newan, Mary Pearl, Catherine Ross, Jan Roth, Connie Royster, Lydia Temoshok, Susan Yecies, Alice Young, and other members of my First Women at Yale group.

I was fortunate to be asked by Matt Seybold and Joe Lemak to be cochair with Tracy Wuster of the Ninth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies as I was working on this book. Our program committee and the attendees at the conference in 2022 stimulated my thinking about issues in this book at a particularly fortuitous juncture. It was also extremely helpful to have an intense multihour seminar-on-wheels driving to and from the Elmira conference from New Haven with legendary Twain scholar David E. E. Sloane.

Being awarded the Olivia Langdon Award for Scholarly Creativity and Innovation from the Mark Twain Circle of America in 2022 and the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Award for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to American Studies from the American Studies Association in 2023 as I worked on this book helped spur me on; I am grateful to both organizations for their recognition of my work.

I want to thank to Judith Richardson for having taken the helm of American Studies at Stanford during my sabbatical and Maritza Colon, An Truong Nguyen, Beth Kessler, Nancy Child, and Leah Chase for all they did to make it possible for me to write a book while directing Stanford’s American Studies Program. And I thank my deans, Gabriella Safran and Debra Satz, for the support they offer faculty in the humanities and for all they’ve done to make those of us involved in doing research in the humanities believe that what we do matters.

My wonderful sons, Joey and Bobby, cheered me on from the start. Creative and talented in their own right, they have been constant sources of inspiration. Other family members have also offered encouragement that helped push me to the finish line—the late Carol Plaine Fisher (z”l), David and Jill Fishkin, Cary Franklin, Betti-Sue Hertz, Joan Perrin, Leonard Plaine (z”l), Moss Plaine, Lynne Breger Tag, and Georgia Witkin. The voices of my late parents, Renée and Milton Fisher (z”l)— both elegant writers and demanding editors—echoed in my ears as I wrote each page; their guidance from beyond the grave made this a better book. The hope that my grandchildren, Sasha and Anna, will have the opportunity to study Huckleberry Finn when they are in high school helped propel me to write this book. In fact, the chance to shape how their gener ation will understand who Jim is and why he does what he does has been a driving force.

My extraordinary husband, Jim Fishkin, has shared his home with this other Jim with more grace and patience than I had any right to expect. Carefully stepping over the piles of books that invaded every corner of our house and taking precious time away from the important book he is finishing himself, he was always ready to be a helpful sounding board and a constant source of encouragement and support. I owe him my greatest debt and dedicate this book to him.