My first thought is not worth printing here, as it was mostly filled with angry curses and lamentations concerning the unfortunate effects of sudden dementia in authors. However, my second thought was this: maybe Twain was scared. He may have realized that his book was too powerful for the people of his time to handle, so he had to tone down the ending to pacify critics. Although he wrote Huckleberry Finn twenty years after the Civil War, many people (especially Southerners) still believed that black people were inferior to white people. Perhaps that is why his disclaimer was so blunt: who knows what angry mobs or harsh book critics might do to a “low down Abolitionist” author who thinks African Americans are real people (43)? Although he was quite safe from Southerners from his location in New Hampshire, he still was careful not to sound too radical, and thus he uses his disclaimer and disappointing ending as bookends of insurance on either side of a truly powerful
My first thought is not worth printing here, as it was mostly filled with angry curses and lamentations concerning the unfortunate effects of sudden dementia in authors. However, my second thought was this: maybe Twain was scared. He may have realized that his book was too powerful for the people of his time to handle, so he had to tone down the ending to pacify critics. Although he wrote Huckleberry Finn twenty years after the Civil War, many people (especially Southerners) still believed that black people were inferior to white people. Perhaps that is why his disclaimer was so blunt: who knows what angry mobs or harsh book critics might do to a “low down Abolitionist” author who thinks African Americans are real people (43)? Although he was quite safe from Southerners from his location in New Hampshire, he still was careful not to sound too radical, and thus he uses his disclaimer and disappointing ending as bookends of insurance on either side of a truly powerful