From Huckleberry Finn to The Shawshank Redemption: Race and the American Imagination in the Biracial Escape Film
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: In a Los Angeles Times review of Stephen King's tetralogy of novellas, Different Seasons (1982), Kenneth Atchity offers what has become almost a cliché of high praise: "To find the secret of his success, you have to compare King to Twain….King's stories tap the roots of myth buried in all our minds."To approach Mark Twain, it is suggested, is to approach something truly universal or at least something quintessentially American.H. L. Mencken echoes the sentiments of some of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century when he calls Twain the "true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American author" (Foerstal 190).At the pinnacle of Twain's work is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which Lionel Trilling describes as "not less than definitive in American literature" (115-6).Shelley Fisher Fishkin calls Huck "the representative American" and the novel "the exemplary great American book" (Arac 184).According to Hemingway, "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn" (22).In suggesting such an affiliation between King and Twain, Atchity suggests that we consider King's work as part of that mythopoeic tradition within which, according to critical tradition, Twain stands as the father and the archetype. 2Ironically, Atchity may have been less insightful regarding King's original work than prescient in foreseeing the transformation of one of those novellas, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," by writer/director Frank Darabont into The Shawshank Redemption, one of the most popular films of the twentieth century.Although it was not well received by reviewers and fared only moderately at the box office, The Shawshank Redemption's sustained popularity through video sales and rentals is reflected in its top position on the Internet Movie Database's user-generated top-250 list, edging out The From Huckleberry Finn to The Shawshank Redemption: Race and the American Imag...
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.10026
Author: Donald Ingram Ulin
Institution: University of Pittsburgh at Bradford
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2056419682