Huckleberry Finn reaches American readers — and gets banned
On this day · 18 February 1885
Mark Twain's vernacular masterpiece arrived in the U.S. in 1885 and was barred from a library within a month.
On February 18, 1885, Charles L. Webster and Company issued the first American edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Readers in the United Kingdom and Canada had already met the book the previous December; printing delays pushed the U.S. release into the new year.
Told entirely in Huck’s own backwoods voice, the novel follows the runaway boy and Jim, an escaped enslaved man, down the Mississippi River on a raft. Its unvarnished vernacular and its hard look at slavery made it both a landmark of American literature and a lightning rod.
Within a month, the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, voted to pull it from the shelves.
That early ban was only the beginning. More than a century later, Huckleberry Finn still surfaces on lists of challenged books in American schools, even as critics rank it among the country’s greatest novels.
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