Should N-Word Be Removed From 'Huck Finn'?

It’s one of the great childhood rites of passage, like learning to ride a bike or finding out that your dad doesn’t actually know everything. But should one of the indelible American literary classics really be overhauled to match our more politically correct times?

If you’ve held off on reading Mark Twain’s iconic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with your young son or daughter out of squeamishness over its liberal, era-appropriate use of the N-word, you might be in luck. According to Publisher’s Weekly, the book that Ernest Hemingway called a masterpiece that is the source of “all modern American literature” is about to be re-released with the offensive racial term replaced by “slave.”

After decades of the book disappearing from grade school shelves and curricula thanks to its repeated use of the N-word (appearing 219 times in “Finn”),Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books have compiled a new version that will be packaged with a similarly scrubbed edition of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" in which the racial term, as well as references to “Injun” have been removed.

"This is not an effort to render ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ colorblind," said Gribben, who has headed the English department at Auburn University at Montgomery for 20 years. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

Gribben, who grew up never hearing the N-word, said the idea for the makeover came after years of teaching the book in which he would use the word “slave” when reading from it aloud.

He was also influenced by a move to the south and by his daughter’s hatred of the book after she became best friends with an African-American student at her magnet school.

Despite the tradition of considering the author’s intent to be sacrosanct in literature, Gribben said he was moved to update the novel after “Sawyer” was chosen for 2009’s Big Read Alabama as part of a program run by the National Endowment for the Arts. He was tapped to write an introduction to an edition of “Finn,” but after dozens of speaking engagements across the state he realized that teachers were avoiding the book because its language was not considered appropriate.

Critics have blasted Gribben for what they say is his attempt to “white-wash” history by ignoring the difficult parts and undercutting Twain’s attempts to expose the hypocrisy of the times.

Do you think the new edition of “Huck Finn” is a good idea?