Mid-July Check In

Hello Maybeck,

I have just added a series of links to help your writing and stimulate your thinking about Huckleberry Finn. The links in the first batch are about Twain himself and his writing, but I have also added a series of links to sites devoted to the issue of slavery, the underground railroad, black history and US literature.

You will probably have noticed that the writing assignments for the course have shifted from writing a paper to writing posts to the blog. However very few posts have accumulated so far, and this is a bit alarming. You should feel an obligation, if you want to do well on this assignment, to check in with the blog from time to time and to generate a series of posts containing your responses to the question raised in the assignments mailed out.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that you should wait unitl the end of the summer to produce your blog posts, rather, you should be deep in the novel already, and the ideas generated by your reading of this funny and controversial book should already be helping you to generate some writing, thinking and questions in response. To stimulate this process, please review the assignments posted at http://www.maybeckhs.org/. Also don't feel that you should have finished the novel before you generate your posts; there is more than enough to think about as you move through the book to help you to generate something significant to say.

In closing, thanks to the few of you who have already begun the conversation via their posts, but more of you need to be checking in. Comb the postings already sent, check out the links, and above all, read hard, annotate carefully, think, write, and enjoy.

Yours,

Michael Ditmore