From the AP comes the latest episode of political correctness that has squashed common sense. Now it appears that two Mark Twain literary classics will be altered. I can only imagine what Twain would say of this effort by a so-called “Twain scholar.” And yes, the story says the “scholar” will try to get the altered books into schools.
Mark Twain wrote that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” 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.”
So the “scholar’s” answer is to change the text?
