Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Meet Shelley

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, where she teaches English and, by courtesy, African and African American Studies. A leading scholar of literature and social justice, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of fifty books and more than 150 articles, including Was Huck Black?, Writing America, and Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade. Her work has shaped American literary studies worldwide, and her honors include lifetime achievement awards from the American Studies Association and the Center for Mark Twain Studies.

About Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade

“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.” —Yale University Press

Shelley’s Links

Website (with links to purchase Jim)