Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finns Comrade [Hardcover]

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain’s beloved yet polarizing literary figure
 
“Astute. . . . Sheds new light on a much-studied character.”—Publishers Weekly
 
Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced inAdventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he is viewed as an emblem both of Twain’s alleged racism and of his opposition to racism; a diminished character inflected by minstrelsy and a powerful challenge to minstrel stereotypes; a reason for banningHuckleberry Finnand a reason for teaching it; an embarrassment and a source of pride for Black readers.
 
Eminent Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin probes these controversies, exploring who Jim was, how Twain portrayed him, and how the world has responded to him. Fishkin also follows Jim’s many afterlives: in film, from Hollywood to the Soviet Union; in translation around the world; and in American high school classrooms today. The result is Jim as we have never seen him before—a fresh and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable Black characters in American fiction.“Two recent books lift Jim out of Twain’s frame as a nimble intellect in disguise:James, by the novelist Percival Everett, andJim, by the literary scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. These authors don’t send Twain up; they send him soaring.”—Lauren Michele Jackson,New Yorker

“More than ever, Twain continues to be a touchstone for American writers—witness Percival Everett’sJames. . . . In Fishkin’s own recent book,Jim, tl