PRAISE:

“Lift(s) Jim out of Twain’s frame as a nimble intellect in disguise.” —The New Yorker

"Astute. . . . Sheds new light on a much-studied character.”—Publishers Weekly

"Few know more about Mark Twain than Stanford Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and few have done more to excavate the racial world of Twain’s America than she has. The author of the landmark book Was Huck Black? Fishkin here writes a biography and critical history of Huckleberry Finn’s companion, the enslaved Jim…. Jim is someone we have often made our own: We project our fears, our sentiments, our fantasies on him. Here, Fishkin restores life to the character. She argues that Twain wished to create a figure of creative power—of imagination, bravery, and eloquence—and dramatize the net that slavery cast over him. Jim comes back, here, as a figure of great wit. Fishkin has a fine ear for comedy in Twain, and a great insight into dialect. In scene after scene, Fishkin shows how Jim is “more active, smart, and assertive…than he is often given credit for.” Jim’s adventures have lived on: stage adaptations, films, classroom discussions, popular cultural artifacts, and so forth. Any reader of Percival Everett’s award-winning novel James should read Fishkin’s book as a scholarly mirror through which to better perceive this great character and ourselves. A powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction’s most complex creations.” —Kirkus Reviews

… “…A major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it…”  Harper’s Magazine…

“Fishkin—the intellectual colossus of Mark Twain’s work—has written an extraordinary and necessary explication of Twain’s iconic and transcendent character Jim—the moral arbiter of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires

“Fishkin crowns her career as a distinguished Mark Twain scholar with this inspired study of his immortal Jim. Exhaustively researched and eloquently argued, it represents a singular service to our national self-knowledge.”—Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes

“Brilliant, original, persuasive, and comprehensive, Fishkin’s Jim is the definitive analysis of the most controversial and misunderstood character in American fiction—indispensable to comprehending Huckleberry Finn. A tour de force!”—Robert Paul Lamb, author of Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story

“On first looking into Fishkin’s Jim I envisioned an Elysian toast: Mark says, ‘Jim, here’s to the gentlewoman who finally got you right.’ Jim says, ‘No, Mark, here’s to the brilliant scholar who got us both right.’”—David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident

“A captivating narrative about enslavement and racism well beyond the fictional character Jim.”—G. Faye Dant, founder of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center
 
“Fishkin stands at the pinnacle of Mark Twain studies and criticism. Her astonishing gifts have taken her, and us, far beyond the often-cramped field of enquiries into Mark Twain. She has stood virtually alone in her insistence on race as the thematic foundation of Mark Twain’s literary greatness, producing books, essays, papers and lectures that break open the deceptively bland yet wickedly subtle strategies through which Twain became a defiant truth-teller. . . . Jim, at the end, is nothing short of a call to hope: hope that even in morally chaotic times such as ours, words—written well, read responsibly, and evaluated with bold sophistication—can save us.”—Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: a Life

“[Fishkin] sees Jim as a worthy role model in a story full of fools, crooks, swindlers, drunks, murderers and, of course, racists. . . . Various writers and critics have made that case, but perhaps nobody has made it so energetically and thoroughly as Fishkin….In a chapter titled “Jim’s Version,” [Fishkin] provides a long account of the events in Huckleberry Finn in Jim’s voice, in part to present and celebrate the virtues of that voice, and in part to emphasize the importance of the fact that we see everything that happens in the novel only through Huck’s eyes. Twain, who discussed in a preface to Huckleberry Finn how much he’d taken care to produce accurately the dialects of various characters in the novel, would have been pleased….[An] important and thoughtful book…” The Arts Fuse

…”Critics have succeeded in making Huckleberry Finn one of the most frequently banned books in the United States. In Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, Shelley Fisher Fishkin—a professor of Humanities at Stanford University and the author of many books—provides an informative and compelling assessment of these controversies…The fog scene, in which Jim upbraids Huck for playing a cruel trick on him and elicits an apology, Fishkin points out, is a rare moment in 19th century American fiction in which an enslaved Black man teaches a white person to treat others with respect….” Florida Courier

“A compendium about Huckleberry Finn’s Jim, this literary history seeks to cement the novel as a resounding social critique. ...  [T]he middle chapter, which is formatted as a creative retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view, is a virtuoso performance that seamlessly inhabits Jim’s dialect.” Foreword Review

“Fishkin has provided us with a fascinating and nuanced deep dive into one of the most debated characters in American Literature, who continues to surface amid our modern debates about race today.” Axios

“At a time when discussions of Jim and his position in American literature are inescapable, Fishkin’s new book offers a well-researched yet undaunting biography of the character for readers who wish to expand their understanding of one of America’s most contentious novels. Fishkin is a renowned Twain scholar whose 1993 book Was Huck Black? is often considered an essential study of the influence of Black vernacular on Twain’s prose in Huck Finn. It should be no surprise, then, that she is intimately familiar with both the novel and its historical setting, which allows her to weave fascinating contexts into her study of Jim with the ease and subtlety of a magician’s sleight of hand…[E]ven the most knowledgeable readers are sure to learn something from her throughout the course of this book…., [K]udos are in order to Fishkin for a daring experiment that serves as an interlude between the book’s Life and Afterlives sections: replicating Twain’s spelling and syntax, she retells Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. ….[T]he chapter is a virtuoso pastiche that highlights Fishkin’s appreciation and understanding of Twain’s use of Black English….” Open Letters Review