Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" is a classic denunciation of slavery, couched in the language and thought of the time. It is the great American novel. People who claim it denigrates a race cannot read and know nothing of our history. The attitudes of the past can only be understood through the writings of the past. Yet many would substitute pap.

Well said Dicho. Everyone, including Guest, is entitled to their own opinion, but anyone who reads Huckleberry Finn and does not see it as one of the great picaresque novels of all time, as a great work of humor, and who cannot see that the character of Huck confronts the issue of slavery by concluding that, although it is "right" by all the laws of his elders, he must abide by his own conscience and do "wrong", is looking at the novel with the kind of hot-button, single-dimensional viewpoint that the censors love. It is certainly Twain's greatest work. I wonder how many of its virulent critics have taken the time to actually read it.

It seems to me our time would be better devoted to engendering in our children the desire to read literature, than in haggling about what constitutes "dangerous" reading matter.