I CLOSED THE COVER STUNNED,” wrote Jane Smiley in her 1996 Harper's article “Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's ‘Masterpiece’” (61). What was it that so stunned the novelist? Twain's authenticity, use of dialect, or—considering her own Midwestern aesthetic— his universal regionalism? Hardly. Smiley was stunned by how bad the book was. With a title connecting Huck to Shoeless Joe Jackson and the disillusionment of the Black Sox scandal, and the use of quotations around the word masterpiece, Smiley trashed the book and Twain from the very start. Smiley was stunned “by the notion that this is the novel all American literature grows out of, that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel” (61). The publication of Huckleberry Finn was for Smiley as tragic a national fall as Shoeless Joe's implication in throwing the 1919 World Series.

Smiley's article stunned academics as well, not for her criticisms of Twain (which were not as new as she seemed to think), but for her wholesale rejection of Twain's work in favor of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The criterion for judgment was ideological, and the article was a salvo in the culture wars, an argument relating more to current politics than past literature. The phrase “culture wars” was popularized by James Davison Hunter in his book bearing the same title, and was derived from the German Kulturkampf (xii). The dispute, like the earlier Brooks-DeVoto debacle, was a fight to define America. Andrew Manis has noted that the conflict involved pluralism, multiculturalism, and “the issue of racial and cultural diversity” (177). Twain, it was clear to Smiley, had been elevated to eminence not from any inherent power in his writing, but because he was puffed as great by Trilling, Eliot, and Fiedler during the “Propaganda Era” (61). Classing Fiedler with Trilling and Eliot as a Cold War propagandist was wild enough, but more stunning was her argument that Stowe's was the better work and should replace Twain's in the canon and classrooms, because Uncle Tom was less stereotypical and more “autonomous” than Jim—begging the question of why “Uncle Tom” has become the epithet it has (64).