Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade

by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Overview

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain’s beloved yet polarizing literary figure
 
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300281316
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Series:	Black Lives
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and professor (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author or editor of many books, including Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, and editor of the twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain. She lives in Stanford, CA.

Editorial Reviews

Two recent books lift Jim out of Twain’s frame as a nimble intellect in disguise: James, by the novelist Percival Everett, and Jim, by the literary scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. These authors don’t send Twain up; they send him soaring.”—Lauren Michele Jackson, New Yorker

“More than ever, Twain continues to be a touchstone for American writers—witness Percival Everett’s James. . . . In Fishkin’s own recent book, Jim, this eminent scholar surveys how Huck Finn’s comrade has been interpreted through the years by academics, filmmakers, and novelists such as Everett.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“[Jim is] a major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, Harper’s Magazine

“An invaluable resource [that] encourages deeper reflection into the merits of reading and teaching Huckleberry Finn—it not only assesses the complexities of Twain’s depiction of Jim, but also calls implicitly for more nuanced readings of other texts that have been casualties of the culture wars.”—Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement

“Astute. . . . Sheds new light on a much-studied character.”—Publishers Weekly

“A powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction’s most complex creations.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[Fishkin] sees Jim as a worthy role model in a story full of fools, crooks, swindlers, drunks, murderers and, of course, racists. . . . Various writers and critics have made that case, but perhaps nobody has made it so energetically and thoroughly as Fishkin.”—Bill Littlefield, Arts Fuse

“A touching homage. . . . An informative and compelling assessment.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier

“At a time when discussions of Jim and his position in American literature are inescapable, Fishkin’s new book offers a well-researched yet undaunting biography of the character for readers who wish to expand their understanding of one of America’s most contentious novels.”—Jesse Day, Open Letters Review

“Fishkin has provided us with a fascinating and nuanced deep dive into one of the most debated characters in American Literature, who continues to surface amid our modern debates about race today.”—Russell Contreras, Axios

“Any Twainian who hesitates to read this book because they have doubts that much can be said about Jim that has not been said before should think again. . . . Jim had a lot to say to Huck. Twain has a lot to say to readers today. This book is an essential prelude to those conversations.”—Mark Twain Forum

“Fishkin—the intellectual colossus of Mark Twain’s work—has written an extraordinary and necessary explication of Twain’s iconic and transcendent character Jim—the moral arbiter of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires

“Fishkin crowns her career as a distinguished Mark Twain scholar with this inspired study of his immortal Jim. Exhaustively researched and eloquently argued, it represents a singular service to our national self-knowledge.”—Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes

“Brilliant, original, persuasive, and comprehensive, Fishkin’s Jim is the definitive analysis of the most controversial and misunderstood character in American fiction—indispensable to comprehending Huckleberry Finn. A tour de force!”—Robert Paul Lamb, author of Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story

“A captivating narrative about enslavement and racism well beyond the fictional character Jim.”—G. Faye Dant, founder of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center

“On first looking into Fishkin’s Jim I envisioned an Elysian toast: Mark says, ‘Jim, here’s to the gentlewoman who finally got you right.’ Jim says, ‘No, Mark, here’s to the brilliant scholar who got us both right.’”—David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident
 
“Fishkin stands at the pinnacle of Mark Twain studies and criticism. Her astonishing gifts have taken her, and us, far beyond the often-cramped field of enquiries into Mark Twain. She has stood virtually alone in her insistence on race as the thematic foundation of Mark Twain’s literary greatness, producing books, essays, papers and lectures that break open the deceptively bland yet wickedly subtle strategies through which Twain became a defiant truth-teller. . . . Jim, at the end, is nothing short of a call to hope: hope that even in morally chaotic times such as ours, words—written well, read responsibly, and evaluated with bold sophistication—can save us.”—Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: a Life

From the Publisher

2025-04-04
Reviving Huck’s friend.

Few know more about Mark Twain than Stanford Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and few have done more to excavate the racial world of Twain’s America than she has. The author of the landmark bookWas Huck Black? Fishkin here writes a biography and critical history of Huckleberry Finn’s companion, the enslaved Jim. Boldly affirming the need to keep the N-word in print but refusing to bow to later convention and use that word as an epithet for Twain’s fictional man, Fishkin gives a life to the kind of person who would have been familiar to the author and many of his readers. Her book writes a history of race relations in America, focusing on various myths about people of African descent. The work explores the place of Black men and women in Twain’s own life and looks at how the novel’s critics often used Jim as a marker for their own predilections. Jim is someone we have often made our own: We project our fears, our sentiments, our fantasies on him. Here, Fishkin restores life to the character. She argues that Twain wished to create a figure of creative power—of imagination, bravery, and eloquence—and dramatize the net that slavery cast over him. Jim comes back, here, as a figure of great wit. Fishkin has a fine ear for comedy in Twain, and a great insight into dialect. In scene after scene, Fishkin shows how Jim is “more active, smart, and assertive…than he is often given credit for.” Jim’s adventures have lived on: stage adaptations, films, classroom discussions, popular cultural artifacts, and so forth. Any reader of Percival Everett’s award-winning novelJames should read Fishkin’s book as a scholarly mirror through which to better perceive this great character and ourselves.

A powerful work of historical scholarship that brings to life one of American fiction’s most complex creations.

Kirkus Reviews