New Edition of ‘Huck Finn’ to Remove ‘N-word’

Source: wikipedia.com

Mark Twain

In the new edition of Mark Twain's classic novel, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" two words will be changed.

Publisher’s Weeklyreports, “Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word...by replacing it with the word "slave." It'll mean a lot of editing - the "n" word appears more than 200 times in the novel.

The new edition will also replace the word "Injun" with "Indian."

The book has long been out of favor in schools and has increasingly been banned from school libraries across the nation.

Gribben’s told Publisher’s Weekly, "This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind … Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century." He also says, "I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified.”

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Critics here and abroad are outraged – the UK’s Guardian writes, “Censoring Mark Twain's 'n-words' is unacceptable.”

On the WSJ's Speakeasy blogaward-winning novelist, poet and critic Ishmael Reed writes, "The fact that a critic has taken to tampering with Twain’s great work is another sign that the atavistic philistinism that has taken hold of our politics and culture has found a place in academia."

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