Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
马克·吐温被称为美国小说的创始人，他推广了聪明文学以抨击种族歧视，理应受到额外褒奖。

I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
之所以说是聪明是因为反奴隶制小说在内战前就已经是文学的重要组成部分了。H.B.斯托的《汤姆叔叔的小屋》就是其中最著名的例子。这些早期的小说直指奴隶制，但也有少数列外，马克·吐温将他对奴隶制和偏见的攻击植入故事里，而故事表面看起来则是是其他的事情。他通过小说吸引读者让他们参与这场讨论。

Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck the mass rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums”. More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurrences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
战后，马克·吐温似乎不得不一次又一次地应对种族主义的挑战，至少现在马克·吐温的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》仍是最受争议的小说。马克·吐温被广泛阅读的的小说中只有几本书像《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》一样经常被下架。从前，人们讨厌这本书，因为人们认为它很粗鲁。马克·吐温写道，那些禁止这本书的人认为这部小说是"垃圾，只适合贫民窟"。最近这本书因为书中的人物，逃跑的黑奴吉姆以及频繁出现的“黑鬼”一词而备受抨击（备受抨击的的"黑鬼吉姆"这个词从未出现过）。

But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction — a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
但这样的攻击无论是过去还是现在都很愚蠢，没有抓住重点。这部小说强烈地反对奴隶制。吉姆从他被强行带走的蓄奴州开始搜寻家人的行为是一种英雄主义的行为。J. Chadwick指出，吉姆这个角色是美国小说中第一个承认奴隶有双重人格的，即"一个是生存于白人奴隶文化之中的声音，另一个是作为个体的声音，吉姆本人，是父亲，也是男人"。

There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold south, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
这样的例子还有很多。马克·吐温的悬疑小说《傻瓜威尔逊》对种族信仰，甚至是许多自由派的种族信仰发起了挑战。当时人们普遍认为黑人不如白人聪明，尤其是智力方面，马克·吐温的小说写了孩子出生时将两个孩子互换的故事。一个奴隶生下了她主人的孩子，生怕孩子被卖到南方去，于是就用自己的孩子换了他主人妻子的孩子。奴隶的浅肤色小孩生长在白人家庭，并在蓄奴阶级的态度和教育思想中长大，而主人妻子的小孩被送到黑人家庭，并在奴隶的态度和教育思想中长大。

The point was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status.The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech，for example—were，to Twain，indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
有一点很明确：决定社会地位的关键是养育而不是本性。人们歧视的是黑人本身的一些特点，比如说话的方式。马克·吐温认为，这些特点正是奴隶制强加给奴隶的。

Twain’s racial was not perfect . One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth--mostly with white men performing in black-face---and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
马克·吐温的种族论调并不完美。依然令人不安，例如，他在自传中用了很长的篇幅来讲述他在青年时期非常喜欢"黑鬼秀"，而那些表演大多是由白人扮成黑人，他母亲嘲笑表演者时他很开心。但我们没有理由认为马克·吐温把这个表演看成是现实的写照。他经常攻击奴隶制和种族歧视表明他拥有敏锐的意识。

Was Twain a racist? Asking the questioning the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
马克·吐温是一个种族主义者吗？在21世纪，问这个问题就如同问林肯是不是一个种族主义者一样睿智。如果我们用当前经过深思熟虑的道德标准作为辨别的“智慧”来解读过去的文字和态度，那么我们只会发现错误。林肯认为黑人不如白人，只有战斗并且赢得战争，才能解放他们。马克·吐温生长在一个蓄奴州，当过兵，创作了吉姆这个形象，跟过去任何一个小说家相比，他也许更能提醒人们种族之间的不公并且唤醒他们的集体良知。