| (Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was a Roman writer, speaker, philosopher and politician) |
If we don't teach our children the dark chapters of American history, they will only know of a past colored by revisionist thinking. We mature through experience but also - and critically - memory. It is tempting to want to erase the history of slavery from America's past and the "n" word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but doing so will not help us move forward by learning the past.
http://media.www.smithsophian.com/media/storage/paper587/news/2011/02/17/Opinions/Censorship.Of.A.Classic.Promotes.Revisionist.History-3977993.shtml
Twain responded: "I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave."
http://able2know.org/topic/163570-1
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twain-publishes-the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn (history of it)
Huckleberry Finn -- T. S. Eliot says:
"It is Huck who gives the book style. The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.... Thus the River makes the book a great book... Mark Twain is a native, and the River God is his God."
Huckleberry Finn -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1935) says:
"Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west. His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas. There were mountains at the frontier but he wanted more than mountains to look at with his restive eyes--he wanted to find out about men and how they lived together. And because he turned back we have him forever."
Huckleberry Finn -- Ernest Hemingway says:
"The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.... All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." -- from Ernest Hemingway, "The Green Hills of Africa" (1934) http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/45645-upcoming-newsouth-huck-finn-eliminates-the-n-word.html AUTHOR:Esther Lombardi
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