'Whitewashing' of literary classics paints controversy

“Not one of them mentions the word. They dance around it,” he said of the messages.

Another Twain scholar, professor Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia, said Gribben was well respected, but Railton called the new version “a terrible idea.”

The language depicts America’s past, Railton said, and the revised book was not being true to the period in which Twain was writing. Railton has an unaltered version of Huck Finn coming out later this year that includes context for schools to explore racism and slavery in the book.

“If we can’t do that in the classroom, we can’t do that anywhere,” he said.

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He said Gribben was not the first to alter Huck Finn. John Wallace, a teacher at the Mark Twain Intermediate School in northern Virginia, published a version of the book about 20 years ago that used “slave” rather than the N-word.

“His book had no traction,” Railton said.

Gribben, a 69-year-old English professor at Auburn University Montgomery, said he would have opposed the change for much of his career, but he began using “slave” during public readings and found audiences more accepting.

He decided to pursue the revised edition after middle and high school teachers lamented they no longer could assign the books.

Some parents and students have called for the removal of Huck Finn from reading lists for more than a half-century. In 1957, the New York City Board of Education removed the book from the approved textbook lists of elementary and junior high schools, but it could be taught in high school and bought for school libraries.

In 1998, parents in Tempe, Ariz., sued the local high school over the book’s inclusion on a required reading list. The case went as far as a federal appeals court; the parents lost.

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