Content area
Full text
For any readers who may find that the criteria for banning books should be changed, I stand right there with you. In all seriousness, libraries across the US ban books in their schools curriculum for various reasons. Most of the time, a school bans a book because they have heard that it uses racist words or has inappropriate themes, but these are some of the very stories that have shaped literature today.1 I think that the criteria for banning books should be lifted completely or at least slightly altered.
When I was in high school, one of my favorite teachers said that we were reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the end of the year, and I was ecstatic. This was the end of my junior year, and after reading that story, I went up to my teacher and told him that I wanted to know all there is to know about Twain. He offered to let me take his higher level writing class which specialized in Twain my senior year. Through this class we would read Mark Twains personal letters, unfinished manuscripts, articles in papers, and other novels. From this class we learned a lot about Twains private life and about his rationale, which a lot of people today are missing.
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an author during the late nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth century. Twain was born in Missouri under Halleys Comet in 1835 and died under Halleys Comet on April 21, 1910. Most people assume that Twain was a racist because he grew up in the Deep South. This thinking is incorrect. Twain sympathized with almost every marginalized group during his life, but everyone hangs onto the fact that he said the n-word in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yes, Twain used a lot of terms in his stories that may be looked at as...