A few years ago, I created a seminar for my students at Columbia University, where I teach writing, about the challenges of separating a novel’s literary value from its politics. There were 10 books on the syllabus, including “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Even though I hadn’t read the novel since I was a child, I knew it had to be part of this course. For more than a century, Mark Twain’s saga of a young white boy and an enslaved Black man traveling on a raft down the Mississippi River has been a fixture of the American canon.

Narrated in Huck's cheeky, irrepressible voice, it pioneered the writing of literary fiction in the vernacular while mercilessly skewering the racism and hypocrisy of white Southerners in the pre-Civil War era. Influential critics from **T. S.

Eliot to Ralph Ellison enshrined it as essential — not just a great book but, in the words of Lionel Trilling, “one of the central documents of American culture.” By the end of the 1940s, it had become a mainstay of anthologies and survey classes. But over the past few decades, this once-standard text has come to occupy a slippery position in the classroom. Some perceive it as an essential commentary on slavery’s depredations, while others feel it endangers Black students — mainly because the racist slur known euphemistically as the N-word appears more than 200** times.

A son of slave owners who married into a prominent abolitionist family, Twain almost certainly intended the novel as an indictment of racial prejudice and used the word to illustrate the racism of his characters, not to endorse it. Still, many readers understandably feel that the novel’s constant repetition of the slur reinforces the system of white supremacy that it purports to critique. In the classroom, where teachers often read aloud, the problem is obvious.

Since 2000, “Huck Finn” has been challenged or banned by school districts in at least 12 states. At the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn., the book sits front and center on a shelf of banned books displayed in a literal cage.