That’s Not Twain

„We are horrified, and we think most readers, textual purists or not, will be horrified too. The trouble isn’t merely adulterating Twain’s text. It’s also adulterating social, economic and linguistic history. Substituting the word »slave« makes it sound as though all the offense lies in the »n-word« and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Worse, it suggests that understanding the truth of the past corrupts modern readers, when, in fact, this new edition is busy corrupting the past.

When Huckleberry Finn was published, Mark Twain appended a note on his effort to reproduce »painstakingly« the dialects in the book, including several backwoods dialects and »the Missouri negro dialect«. What makes Huckleberry Finn so important in American literature isn’t just the story, it’s the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language. There is no way to »clean up« Twain without doing irreparable harm to the truth of his work.”