As the home of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts, the very name of Concord, Massachussetts, connotes sophisticated literary dissent. Yet a month after the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the committee in charge of Concord's public library voted to remove the book from its shelves, fearing that Huck Finn's irreverence would undermine the morals of young readers. In full agreement, Louisa May Alcott proposed a more radical ban: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses,” she advised, “he had best stop writing for them. ” Jo March would not be allowed to play with Huck.

Thus far, the banning of Huckleberry Finn is a familiar sort of ironic anecdote whereby Alcott and the cultural guardians of Concord reveal their moral timidity, their literary obtuseness, or both. But the story does not end here with the self-exposure of an ostensibly enlightened authority. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did go on, of course, to become the American classic, and generations of children were duly made to read it. What makes this turnabout remarkable, and unlike the elevation of, for instance, Madame Bovary after it too was to be banned or, nearer home, the ascension of Pierre into a classic and a cult, is that the canonization of Twain's novel has not involved significant rereading. The Huckleberry Finn celebrated as the archetypal American novel is acclaimed precisely for being, as the Concord critics charged, "rough, coarse, and inelegant," and especially for featuring a hero who lies, uses profanity, and steals besides, a boy who everyone agrees is, as to class and culture, the "veriest trash." When Bernard DeVoto declared Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the preeminent American novel (maybe approached but certainly not surpassed by Moby-Dick) , he took it as generally understood that jettisoning elegance and refinement through a vernacular narration was the novel's most spectacular achievement. "It is the one book in our literature," Leo Marx noted, "about which highbrows and lowbrows can agree."