books

New Huckleberry Finn Edition Will Omit Racially Sensitive Words

Next month, NewSouth Books is publishing a version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that combines it with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that’s hardly the new book’s most controversial choice. Twain scholar Alan Gribben spearheaded the project primarily to remove Huck Finn’s epithets for African-Americans and Native-Americans (they’ve either been omitted or, in the former case, replaced by words like “slave”), hoping that teachers wary of the inflammatory terms would now be willing to re-embrace the classic novel and teach it in schools. “For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs,” said Gribben, acknowledging, “I’m hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified.” [Publishers Weekly]

New Huckleberry Finn Edition Will Omit Racially Sensitive Words