Another Steve Donoghue Q & A.  

I try to never miss an opportunity to put in a question whenever these come along.  I linked to one of my questions on a Donoghue Q &A back in May 2020, and haven't linked to any others since.  (Largely because I restricted my linking June 2020, and have only relaxed those rules recently).   But I've been putting in questions regularly at every Steve Donoghue Q & A.  I think there a lot of fun.  Steve Donoghue has read everything, remembers everything he reads, and has strong opinions about absolutely everything he reads.  So you can put in a question about anything literary related and then listen to him expound upon the subject for a minute or two.

I put my question in last week (link here): 

The Huckleberry Finn Question.  (Forgive me if this has been asked before).  As you know, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been called the greatest American novel.  Is it as great as all of its critics say it is, or has it been overpraised?

Actually  my original question was longer.  Originally I also said something like, "As you also know, nowadays the main discussion on the book is whether it is racist or anti-racist.  What do you think?"  But I came back a couple hours later to edit that part out.  Over the past year, in various Q & As I've asked him about political correctness in the Flashman series and racism in the Fu-Manchu series, and I was worried that I might be perceived as one-note, or that Steve might think I was trying to get him hashtagged.  So I just left in the first question.  

Anyways, Steve answers my question at 2:58:

For my review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, see HERE.

The Hemingway quote that Steve alludes to is:  "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' ... it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

There's also this quote from H.L. Menken:

"I believe that 'Huckleberry Finn' is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of 'Don Quixote' and 'Robinson Crusoe,' that it is vastly better than Gil Blas, 'Tristram Shandy,' 'Nicholas Nickleby' or 'Tom Jones.' I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, and over and over again, long after every book written in American between the years 1800 and 1860, with perhaps three exceptions, has disappeared entirely save as a classroom fossil."