A Politically Correct Huck Finn
Despite being considered one of the greatest American novels, “Huckleberry Finn” is the fourth most banned book in U.S. schools. Now the N-word is being removed by one publisher.
Michael Tomasky on publishing an edition of Huck Finn with the N-world replaced by ‘slave’: If I’d been on some committee that voted on whether to publish this new edition, I guess I’d have voted no. The preservation of great literature as its author intended is pretty important (and I should note that I think Huck Finn is still the greatest American novel). But so are a culture’s changing values. That’s not the same thing as censorship, or even political correctness, in which a minority browbeats the majority into submission on some often picayune semantic point. This may be semantic, but it’s not picayune.
