SOURCE: Cummings, Sherwood. “Mark Twain's Moveable Farm and the Evasion.” American Literature 63, no. 1 (September 1991): 440-58.

In the following essay, Cummings notes that Twain evades the issue of race in Huckleberry Finn by placing the Phelps farm in Arkansas.

The Quarles farm, southwest of Hannibal, where young Sam Clemens spent his summers with his aunt and uncle and their slaves, was as important in Mark Twain's imagination as Hannibal itself. Used simply as setting, the farm came, as Mark Twain said, “very handy to me in literature once or twice.”¹ His most signal use of it was to turn it into Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps's plantation in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Located where Huck and Jim's long raft voyage down the Mississippi ended, the Phelps place must be considerably south of its Missouri counterpart, but just how far south is a matter of disagreement. There...