Revising Mark Twain

NewSouth Books plans to release a new edition of Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer.” The new edition will replace offensive words for with more politically correct terms, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The n-word, which appears over 200 times in “Huckleberry Finn,” will be replaced with “slave.” The new edition will also change “Injun Joe” to “Indian Joe.”

Alan Gribben, chairman of the English department at Alabama’s Auburn University, teamed with NewSouth to make the corrections. He is helping “clean up” the book to make it more acceptable in the classroom. Gribben thinks that teachers will reintroduce the literature in their classroom after the changes.

“In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable,” he said to Publisher’s Weekly.

He defends the changes in the introduction of the book, the Wall Street Journal reports. In excerpts shown, he writes:

“We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers.”