Edition removes N-word from Mark Twain classics
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Mark Twain wrote that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.”[Twain never said this.] A new edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with “slave” in an effort not to offend readers.
Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in “Huck Finn” and four times in “Tom Sawyer.” He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those “which people praise and don’t read.”
“It’s such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers,” Gribben said.
Yet Twain was particular about his words. His letter [it was an essay] in 1888 about the right word and the almost right one was “the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” [Still got the quote wrong.]
Correction: From the essay ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses’. Enjoy.
