No, no she mustn’t remove Twain. To hell with all the other books I agree. To Kill A Mockingbird just feels like another white savior novel I agree. Haven’t read the other ones but Twain most certainly put black people’s pain during the time period front and center. Twain’s style of writing was to mock the racism of his fellow Southerners. He does this by over exaggerating the racist customs and attitudes of the people in the book. Similar to how Rowling writes the characters of the Dursleys in the Harry Potter series. He purposely made white Southerners look in a mirror by making his characterizations of them grotesque and hard to ignore. Twain was a revolutionary. He openly mocked Christianity and racism in his writing. During that time period and region in which he lived he was an incredibly revolutionary thinker. Before you write Twain off completely I urge you to look at Twain from the perspective I just mentioned. Disney plus still has their version of Huckleberry Finn starring Elijah wood. I urge you to watch it. I hadn’t watched it since I was a child but Huckleberry is a character with a conscience. I’m not saying Twain was perfect but he was aware of the atrocities committed around him. He wrote Huck with the purpose of pricking the conscience of other white Southerners in that time period. I’ll put it another way. In 2020 if you showed a little Southern white boy with Trump supporting parents that movie the parents would have a big problem on their hands. Trust me I know the fact that white people in 2020 still have to see other white people behaving with a conscience for them to relate is a whole bigger issue. But Twain has created a legacy of pricking the hearts of white children for 100s of years. In a world where white children only see black children living alongside them with iPhones etc Twain is so important. He paints a vivid picture of slavery and the atrocities committed toward black people of the time period through the eyes of a white child. Very rarely does any of the literature of that time period address any wrongdoing on the part of white people at all. Yet, here is this man named Twain taking on the evils of emerging capitalism (Tom’s Sawyers fence). The false piety and hypocrisy of the “ god fearing people of Hannibal” false imprisonment, the tyranny of the majority and racism . The pain that both Jim and Huckleberry experience reaches a climax when Jim is almost lynched. Twain made the main character a white boy but who you empathize with throughout the book is not Huck but most often Jim. It’s as if Twain knew for him to take a tour of the evils of American slavery he had to have a white boy leading the tour. By the end of Huck Finn. Twain paints a picture of Jim a free black man. In the movie, Jim is dressed like a well to do member of society I like that touch they added. Twain is saying , “This could be reality instead.” Write the rest of the books off if you will but not Twain. I’ve remembered the term “exaggerated bigotry.” Another author by the name of Donna Tartt uses this technique in her book “ The Secret History” where she exposes the glaring homophobia and racism that exists in her “All American” character Bunny. They recently made a motion picture out of one of her other books “ GoldFinch”. She grew up in the South like Twain. Many authors have used Twain’s technique but Twain did it best. John Swift gave him a run for his money with the eating babies satire.