Other critics have focused on the theme of racism in individual works of literature

Other critics have focused on the theme of racism in individual works of literature. Frances W. Kaye, for example, continues a long-standing and vigorous discussion about racism in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Anna Shannon Elfenbein has explored Kate Chopin’s manipulation of racial and gender stereotypes in The Awakening (1899), and André Bleikasten has considered William Faulkner’s depiction of outsiders—racial and other—and their treatment by Southern society. Literary scholars and biographers have also made assumptions and reached conclusions about various authors’ stance toward racism as a result of their treatment of the theme in their works. Clare R. Goldfarb has written about William Dean Howells’s personal view of racism based on several of his works, for example, while Thomas R. Tietze and Gary Riedl have probed Jack London’s attitude toward racism as exhibited in his short stories about the South Seas. Toni D. Knott has defended Ernest Hemingway’s treatment of racism in To Have and Have Not (1937), and Chinua Achebe has written eloquently about Joseph Conrad’s racist treatment of Africa and Africans in Heart of Darkness (1902).