February 18 · This Day in America
Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" goes on sale in the United States, and American literature is never quite the same. A barefoot boy and a runaway enslaved man named Jim push a raft down the Mississippi, and in their voices — plain, unschooled, alive — a country finally hears itself talk. Hemingway would later say all modern American literature comes from this one book. It scandalized the genteel: a Concord library banned it within weeks as "coarse" and "trash." But Twain had done something more daring than offend. He had let an ordinary boy's conscience wrestle the cruelty he was raised inside — and let the boy choose Jim, even believing it would damn him. "All right, then, I'll go to hell." It is still the truest sentence in American fiction. The river kept moving. So did the argument.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1861
On the steps of the Alabama capitol in Montgomery, Jefferson Davis takes an oath as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. Seven states have left the Union; the nation now has two governments and one unbearable question. Within two months the guns open on Fort Sumter. The republic Lincoln was about to lead would be tested as no nation had been before.
Source: www.battlefields.org
“All right, then, I'll go to hell.”Huckleberry Finn, in Mark Twain's novel, 1885