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I am not quite halfway through with Ron Chernow’s 1200-page biography of Mark Twain, so it would be unfair to call this a “review” per se, but … c’mon. It’s a book by one of America’s preeminent historians about very likely the most important writer ever born on American soil. I’ve already read and loved his biographies of Hamilton and Washington, and I’ll get to the Grant and Rockefeller books sooner or later. There’s no universe where this isn’t a magnificent book, and it’s not like there’s going to be any plot twists in the last five hundred pages. This is a great biography already and it’s enormously unlikely I’m going to encounter anything that will change my mind– and if I do, it’ll change my mind about Mark Twain, and not about Chernow’s book about him.

All that said, I learned something today, and I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information about it, and I need to share this information with you.

If you buy one of the approximately one billion available editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that include the original engravings, you will encounter at some point this image of Huck, his Uncle Silas, and his Aunt Sally:

You will note the arrow pointing just underneath Uncle Silas’ crotch, and you will note the straight line of his pants. You may also note the look on Aunt Sally’s face, which I feel deserves more attention in general.

This is not the image that was in the first printing of the book. That image looked like this, known as the “curved fly” engraving:

See that curved line? That’s the original engraving by E.W. Kemble, whose name you’ll note in the lower right. Twain selected Kemble himself, and presumably did not vet this image of Uncle Silas for a single slightly, barely bulgey line in his pants.

After a few hundred copies of the first edition were printed, a salesman noticed that someone had somehow changed the engraving to … well, this:

That right there, folks, is Uncle Silas’ cock, although it appears to be growing out of his leg rather than in the usual location. Maybe that has something to do with the look on Aunt Sally’s face, I dunno. Maybe dicks were different in 1884. You’ll note that said penis is pointed directly at Huck, which isn’t relevant to the story but adds an extra little twist of creepy to it.

Anyway, the edition was very speedily recalled, and the offending pages destroyed, although an unknown number of copies remained in the wild. A book with the offending penis in it has never made it to auction or been sold publicly, and it’s not known how many might be out there. (Check out this absolutely amazing contemporary article about the controversy from New York World. The euphemisms. My God, the nineteenth-century euphemisms.)

The University of Virginia has at least one copy of the edition with the penis, which is where the image came from. They had to redo the engraving for the rest of the no-longer-“first” edition, and the new version of the engraving had a straight fly.

Copies of the “curved fly” edition (without the penis) go for lots and lots of money. My favorite detail about that $15,000 listing? Shipping is $4.00 and they accept returns within thirty days.

The person who altered the engraving was never identified.

…I’m not, really, but I suspect I’m going to get one anyway.

Go read this article. It’s okay, I can wait and the article’s short.

You didn’t click on the link, did you.

Sigh. People nowadays.

That’s okay, actually, as this article’s really easy to nutshell and isn’t very complicated: a high school in Philadelphia has decided to stop teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in their eleventh-grade language arts classes, primarily because of the book’s repeated (over 200 times, apparently) use of the N-word. Predictably, folks are mad.

I feel like this is the part where I should start establishing my Twain bona fides. I’ve read Finn and Sawyer repeatedly. His Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses is one of the greatest pieces of writing in the history of the English language. And I have read a ton of Twain outside of those three pieces, although obviously those are the big ones.

(Takes deep breath)

I’m good with this, guys.

Lemme be real specific, here: I’m not saying whether Finn should or shouldn’t be taught in high schools. I’m saying that I’m okay with the decision made by this high school that the difficulties introduced by the language in the book outweigh the literary benefits of making the kids all read it. I note that the book will remain in the library, where kids who want to read it can still easily access it. And that, to me, makes an immense amount of difference.

Here is the thing, and it’s one of the most wonderful things about literature: I am absolutely certain that I will die without running out of things to read. Absolutely certain. I will die regretting never having had read something. And that’s speaking as someone who reads 125-150 books a year. The median number of books read by adults per year in the United States, a number in this case more useful than the average, is five.

In other words, there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of books that high school students could be reading as part of their English classes. Several of them are even by Twain. Even more are from the same time period as Twain, and cover similarly pedagogically-useful material! Relatively fewer guarantee that you’ll have to spend sizeable chunks of your class time debating whether your kids have to or should read the n-word out loud if for some reason they have to read something out loud.

(Yes, it’s still useful for high school students to have something read to them from time to time. Choral or turn-based reading, maybe not, especially at the class level, but even a class with no out-loud reading at all will surely have to repeat a passage every now and again while discussing it.)

Is Huckleberry Finn one of the foundational works of American literature? Hell yes. Should everyone– American or otherwise– read Huckleberry Finn? Yes. Eventually.

I have more trouble with the suggestion that everyone must read Huck Finn while 1) in high school and 2) under the auspices of an English teacher. Pull Huck from your library? Make it unavailable in bookstores? You and me, we gon’ fight. Pull it from a college curriculum? Less defensible, since those kids generally have a lot more leeway about what classes they’re taking.

But I just can’t get mad that a high school has decided that this one book isn’t worth the effort of the external issues it brings with it. I almost feel like it’s better taught in history classes anyway, where the social milieu of the book can be discussed more fully, and hopefully by people a bit more qualified to do so. (At this point I laugh, because I know full well that the first name of most high school history teachers is “Coach,” but I also know I had a couple of really good ones.)

So, yeah. Feel free to call me an asshole in comments now. I think I’m okay with this.