Jim

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 in Adventures 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 banning Huckleberry Finn and 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