SOURCE: “Challenging Mark Twain's Tales of Simpler Times,” in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 90, No. 83, March 26, 1998, p. B1.

In the following review, Charles provides a favorable assessment of Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” and since then a river of ink has flowed to justify that monumental claim.

Two years ago, Jane Smiley went against this current of praise and took the nation's school teachers to task for excusing what she considers Twain's moral passivity in response to slavery.

In Harper's magazine the Pulitzer Prize-winning author wrote, “All the claims that are routinely made for the book's humanitarian power are, in the end, simply absurd. To invest The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with greatness is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is.”

It's...