Legal Commentary

The Bowdlerization of Huckleberrry Finn

By Jonathan H. Adler

Publishers Weekly reports on the publication of a new, sanitized version of Mark Twain?s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain?s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure?T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of ?all modern American literature.? Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation?s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: ?nigger.?

Twain himself defined a ?classic? as ?a book which people praise and don?t read.? Rather than see Twain?s most important work succumb to that fate, 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 (as well as the ?in? word, ?Injun?) by replacing it with the word ?slave.?

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on January 04, 2011 (boomark / email).