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 him and how the
world has responded to him. Fishkin also follows Jim’s many afterlives: in film from Hollywood
to the Soviet Union in translation around the world and in American high school classrooms
today. The result is Jim as we have never seen him before—a fresh and compelling portrait of
one of the most memorable Black characters in American fiction.
