Huckleberry Jim

About this book

Set in 1991, *Huckleberry Jim* follows two actors — Axel Emerson, a twenty-two-year-old white actor fresh out of conservatory, and Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor with a lifetime of stages behind him — on a children's tour of *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* through upstate New York and the Appalachians. The novel is inspired by real events. As the two-man company drives from school gymnasium to community theater, performing Twain's text to American children in the year of Anita Hill, Rodney King's arrest, and the height of the culture wars, the road between them becomes a slow reckoning with race, performance, fatherhood, and what it costs to play another man's part. Publishes October 6, 2026 — during Banned Books Week, in the year of America's Semiquincentennial, and the 150th anniversary of Tom Sawyer. The timing is intentional.