27th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize: “Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade”
Nov 17 | 12pm | MSC 2300 D
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University
The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University has awarded the Twenty-Seventh Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize to Shelley Fisher Fishkin, for her book Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade published by Yale University Press in 2025.
Public Lecture & Award Presentation
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, editor or co-editor of fifty books, including Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade; Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee; Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture; Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture; Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices; and From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. She is editor of the twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain and The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his Life and Work. She was awarded the Bode-Pearson Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Studies Association and the John Tuckey Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In 2019 American Studies Association established the “Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International scholarship in Transnational American Studies” in her honor.
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.
“Fishkin’s text situates Twain’s “Jim” in the global context and demonstrates how this fictional character becomes a barometer for reader’s prejudices. Drawing on her career as a Twain scholar, Fishkin settles debates concerning the propriety of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for K-12 education and offers pedagogical strategies for teaching Twain's text.” - Final Selection Committee Judge
“Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Jim is a remarkable feat of scholarship that exemplifies interdisciplinarity. Not only does she discuss in detail the history of enslavement, literary history of Jim the character, and important biographical details about Mark Twain, but she also provides pedagogical resources, performance histories, and even a creative writing adaptation of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective. With all of these, Fishkin has provided comprehensive new understandings about Jim that readers from any angle would enjoy from high schoolers first encountering Jim to English professors who had studied the character extensively. Fishkin has done something so comprehensive and new that it will inevitably make an immense mark on Twain studies and set the standard for what interdisciplinary humanities scholarship should be.” - Final Selection Committee Judge
The prize, first awarded in 1999, was permanently endowed in December 2000 by Melbern G. Glasscock ’59 as a gift for his wife, Susanne, for whom the prize is named. This unique prize celebrates outstanding works of original, interdisciplinary humanities scholarship that appeal to both academic and wider audiences.