On a recent road trip, I listened to an audio performance of Mark Twain’s scrappy, irreverent, often hilarious Roughing It, an account of his travels in the Wild West during the 1860s. Not having read the book since my college days, I had forgotten how much of its humor derives from ridicule, especially directed toward Indians, former slaves, and Mormons. It is always painful to encounter in the pages of a writer whom one admires contemptuous references to women, Native Americans, Blacks, Jews, immigrants, gays, or any other class or category of people. Though such writers may be merely echoing sentiments common to their era and social situation, as Mark Twain certainly was, we want them to be superior to their age. We want them to be as enlightened in their views as they are talented in their writing.

But are we who grimace at such unconscious prejudice free of it ourselves? For those of us who are writers, toward whom do we show our own ignorance or hostility? If, generations from now, future readers find their way to our books, what crude biases, invisible to us, will be painfully obvious to them?