Percival Everett has breathed fierce life into one of American literature's iconic characters in James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave. But language is ...

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the critic Lionel Trilling wrote, is “one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture,” in part because it grows with its readers.

Forty-three years ago this month, libraries around the country observed the first Banned Books Week. Its co-founder, Judith Krug, was the director of the American Library Association’s Office for ...

The man called Jim has always been the hero of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain might have titled the book, often considered to be the Great American Novel, after the white boy who is ...

Everyone should know the name Percival Everett by now. His “Also by Percival Everett” lists read like discographies, revealing more than 30 novels with resonant, sometimes playful titles such as “The ...

“If one knows hell as home,” Percival Everett’s Jim asks, “Is returning to hell a homecoming?” Everett’s novel James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, places Jim at the middle of the ...

On Feb. 15, 1885, 140 years ago next week, Mark Twain’s best work of fiction, “Huckleberry Finn,” was first published in the United States. Critics berated the book. In Concord, Massachusetts, ...

With Huck Finn, Twain was contributing something more than a lighthearted boy s book, Levy writes. He was thinking and speaking about literacy, popular culture, compulsory education, juvenile ...

In the mid-1980s, Broadway made an effort to recruit songwriters from Nashville and producers happened on a man named Roger Miller, at that point best known for penning the song “King of the Road,” a ...