People have been calling Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” a great American novel for more than a century. Mark Twain said that this story of a young white boy and an enslaved Black man floating on a raft down the Mississippi River was the very root of all American literature. “There was nothing before,” he wrote. “There has been nothing as good since.”

Did you read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” when you were young? I did, a long time ago at a fancy prep school in Concord, Massachusetts, and if there were any discussions of the racial slur that shows up in it more than 200 times, I don’t recall them. The book was cast as satire, an important commentary on the horror of slavery, a meditation on compassion and irony. It sure was uncomfortable, though, when the teacher had us read passages from the book aloud. In 2026, many students are upset by the slurs, and many educators are wary of a book that uses them and that could lead to job-endangering conversations, so they simply don’t assign it.

For The New York Times Magazine today, the literary critic Michiko Kakutani asks how — or whether — the novel should still be taught. She quotes a Twain scholar who compares “Huckleberry Finn” to fugu, a Japanese fish so potentially poisonous that sushi chefs must acquire a license to serve it. “If it’s prepared right, it’s phenomenal,” the scholar said. “If it’s taught wrong, it can be toxic.”

Kakutani worries that such an approach isn’t really scalable, at least outside elite schools. “It’s easy to see how the social dynamics could spin out of control in a classroom led by a teacher with less experience or skill or fewer resources,” she writes. At the end of every school year, Randall Kennedy, the Harvard teacher, asks his students in an anonymous survey whether the novel should continue to be taught. Some say no. “It’s just racist,” one of them responded.