Mark Twain loved blackface. In his autobiography, a meandering hodgepodge of facts, feelings, and footnotes that was embargoed until recently, Twain paused on several occasions to laud minstrelsy, the racist cultural form that grossly lampooned the character and speech of Black folk for the amusement of white audiences, as occupying “a standard and a summit to whose rarified altitude the other forms of musical art may not hope to reach.” The Missouri native attended so many minstrel shows while writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—often hailed as the Great American Novel—that scholars have made note of how its structure and dialogue mimic those of a standard minstrel performance.
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