Every Generation Got Its Blacklist.

Every Generation Got Its Blacklist.

The blacklist is one of America’s most durable inventions.

We like to remember it as something that happened in black-and-white photographs: congressional hearings, frightened witnesses, careers destroyed because somebody’s name appeared on the wrong piece of paper.
But blacklists rarely announce themselves as blacklists. They arrive disguised as protection. Decency. Community standards. Parental rights. Public safety. The conviction that somebody, somewhere, must decide what the rest of us should be permitted to see, hear, read—or become.

That is part of why Huckleberry Jim takes place in 1991.

It was a hinge point in the American culture wars. The battles over music, art, sexuality, language, race and books were becoming battles over who had the authority to define the culture itself. And Huckleberry Finn—already more than a century old—was once again standing in the middle of it.

Thirty-five years later, the vocabulary has changed. The mechanism hasn’t.
We are still arguing about libraries. Still arguing about classrooms. Still arguing about which histories are too dangerous for children and which words make a book unfit to be read.

And still making lists.

Huckleberry Jim publishes October 6 during Banned Books Week because the argument at the center of the novel never stayed in 1991.

It followed us here.

Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor’s Pick: “Adam Nelson’s incisive, provocative, and robustly American debut... honors the fathoms-deep American divisions that Twain marked and urges us to look closer rather than away. For readers of Percival Everett’s James and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.”

{Full Review}
Publishers Weekly BookLife review: https://booklife.com/my/project/huckleberry-jim-108347

Audiobook from Blackstone Publishing.

Official launch October 10 at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

Available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop and fine bookstores everywhere. First Edition autographed copies available at HuckleberryJimBook.com.
​
#HuckleberryJim #BannedBooksWeek #MarkTwain #BookBans #LiteraryFictio