WTF Or Not? The Censoring of Mark Twain

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." — Mark Twain

"There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule--and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time." - Mark Twain's Letter to Denver Post dated Aug. 14, 1902; also published in NY Tribune Aug. 22, 1902 (regarding banning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Denver Library.)

It's a sad day in the publishing world because 135 years after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and 126 years after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were published, the new edition of each of these books will be censored based on one word that appears throughout both these novels.

From Publishers Weekly:

"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."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.

"Including the table of contents, the slur appears 219 times in Finn."

Also the word "injun" has been replaced with "Indian."

I think people forget that, "Twain wrote a novel that embodies the search for freedom. He wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an intense white reaction against blacks. According to some critics,Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice, increasing segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for freedom" (from Wikipedia)

Is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a classic of modern American literature next? The same slur found in Mark Twain's books appears 48 times in To Kill a Mockingbird.

What about Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe written in 1852? "Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s." (from Wikipedia)

How about Native Son by Richard White, a novel that's a powerful statement about racial inequality and social injustices?

Or how about his book by Randall Kennedy?

Or this book by Dick Gregory?

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot." — Eugene O'Neill