
Next month will see the release of NewSouth Books’ Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The Texts of His Companion Boy Books, which collects the two 19th century classics and revises them to remove an offensive word that, for years now, has been the cause of protests against teaching the books in schools.
The word?: ‘nigger.*’
In NewSouth’s edition, which was revised by Mark Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben, all instances of the word ‘nigger’ have been replaced by the word ‘slave’, as has the word ‘injun’, a derogatory term for Native Americans.
Gribben, who is passionate about Twain’s works, told Publishers Weekly he’s not trying to render these works “colorblind,” but that “Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”
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