SOURCE: Camfield, Gregg. “Sentimental Liberalism and the Problem of Race in Huckleberry Finn.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46, no. 1 (June 1991): 96-113.

In the following essay, Camfield discusses Twain's debt to the dynamic of literary sentimentalism in Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain is one of those rare writers loved by both academics and the larger public, though it should surprise no one that the academy and the public seem fond of him for different reasons. One can get some idea of the popular response to Twain by looking at how he has been marketed since his death. His tremendous popularity led Hollywood quickly to turn his works to account; studios produced film versions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as early as 1920.¹ The best known of these, the 1939 MGM version starring Mickey Rooney as Huck, purifies the tale by eliminating all of Tom Sawyer's appearances, by having Huck convert so completely to abolitionism that...