The Mark Twain Journal has selected Alan Gribben as the Fall 2025 Legacy Scholar. Read the Contents Page with Irene Wong’s annotations to the Fall 2025 issue here.
Companion Novels HF and TS Available in Translated Dialect Editions
The new Translated Dialect Edition, Illustrated of Tom Sawyer is now available from Black Belt Press! “A welcome alternative for schools and teachers.”–Mark Twain Forum, May 2025 Alan Gribben and Irene Wong have co-edited the Translated Dialect Edition, Illustrated of Huckleberry Finn. Alan previously edited the Original Language Editions and NewSouth Editions (the latter omitting…
MTLR’s New Covers from UGA 2025
The University of Georgia Press has released with new covers Volumes One and Two of Mark Twain’s Literary Resources. Considering that MTLR, Volumes One and Two combined, contains over 1300 pages, a few errors were inevitable. Those are corrected and more entries are added in this revised edition. ABOVE: Amazon currently has both volumes of…
Harry Huntt Ransom: Intellect in Motion
By Irene Wong In 2008, the Harry Huntt Ransom Centennial Birthday Celebration was held at the University of Texas at Austin. After the program and among the events was the book signing of Harry Huntt Ransom: Intellect in Motion, an official biography by Alan Gribben. Alan “endeavored to tell virtually the entire story of the…
“Trading Boyhoods: William Dean Howells and Mark Twain”
The Spring 2024 issue of the MARK TWAIN JOURNAL contains my latest study related to Twain’s reading, an essay describing how Mark Twain and his friend William Dean Howells seem to have supplied each other with topics and situations they employed in their autobiographical and fictional writings about boyhood. Congratulations to Joe B. Fulton for…
60 Minutes, March 20, 2011
Randall Williams, NewSouth Books
8 Famous Authors Whose Works Have Been Rewritten by Their Publishers
“Although one member of my campus department personally chided the NewSouth editor-in-chief for altering the text, most of my colleagues seem to comprehend the purpose of this effort to reintroduce Twain’s novels into the classroom. Professors in the fields of medieval and Renaissance literature even mentioned the many concessions in translation necessary to make the…
Emails and Letters to Alan Gribben, 2011
Within a few weeks of the PUBLISHERS WEEKLY article, my office computer registered 1,082 personal emails–443 (41%) strongly objecting to the NewSouth Edition, most of these unsigned and a great many of them seeming to take pleasure in an opportunity to throw the n-word around in denouncing me and my edition. A significant percentage…
Remarks about using the n-word in the classroom
HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER: “I completely stopped teaching this book because of the effect it has on African American students. Any person who disagrees with your version should be forced to assign and teach the original version . . . just so they can experience the difficulty and discomfort of such hateful language in a scholastic…
American Realism in 1840s
“The use of the n-word in the 1840s when HUCKLEBERRY FINN is set was historically accurate in in keeping with the American Realism Movement of which Twain was a proponent.” –Alan Gribben The Original Text Edition (and the NewSouth Edition) are available at Amazon https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+alan+gribben+books&rlz=1C1EJFC_enUS868US868&oq=amazon+alan+gribben+books&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.8542j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1 and UGA Press https://ugapress.org/imprints/newsouth-books/ (NewSouth Books merged with UGA Press…
Why is removing the n-word not censorship?
PEOPLE Magazine took note of the controversy, Jan 24, 2011.
“Textual purists would rather the book not be read at all than to make a change that would encourage readership of a great American novel.” –Alan Gribben
The NewSouth Edition that removed a racial slur and caused a “controversy.”
The N-Word Controversy
Social media in 2011 meant Facebook and Twitter.
A Peek into Volume Two
All of Alan Gribben published works are available from Amazon.
Rasmussen’s Tom Sawyer Critical Insights
R. Kent Rasmussen collected and edited essays about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) in a Critical Insights volume (Salem Press/EBSCO, 2022). Sixteen contributors–Rasmussen, Peter Messent, Alan Gribben, Joe B. Fulton, Philip Bader, John Bird, Kevin MacDonnell, K. Patrick Ober, Linda Morris, Hannah J. D. Wells, Kerry Driscoll, John H. Davis and Hugh H. Davis,…
MTLR is Amazon’s #1 release in Literary Bibliographies & Indexes
Thank you! Half a century of research into Mark Twain’s reading and literary resources are in these pages. Check out my Reader’s Guide to find everything you’re curious about in the Annotated Catalog. Alan All my titles are available on Amazon https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+alan+gribben+books&rlz=1C1EJFC_enUS868US868&oq=amazon+alan+gribben+books&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.8542j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1
Clay Jenkinson interviews Alan Gribben
In a 2022 interview Alan Gribben defends his n-word-free edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Clay S. Jenkinson, humanities scholar, historian, and founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, conducted this interview. The NewSouth Edition and the Original Text Edition of both Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are available from https://ugapress.org/imprints/newsouth-books/ (NewSouth Books merged with UGA…
2021 Eugene Current-Garcia Award Ceremony via Zoom
Alan Gribben, recipient of the 2021 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinguished Literary Scholar, talks about “Living in Mark Twain’s Mind: A Fifty-Year Puzzle” via Zoom. The Monroeville Literary Festival and the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama are pleased to announce that Dr. Alan Gribben has been selected as the recipient of the 2021…
The Big Read in 2010 (Video)
The idea of removing the n-word from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn–by translating this detested racial slur as “slave” instead–occurred to me after I completed a tour of libraries in Alabama and Georgia to promote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the NEA Big Read program. Teachers approached me in every town and said that they could not (or would not) teach…
Best Summaries of Research into Twain’s Reading
When asked which essays summarize Mark Twain’s reading, scholar Alan Gribben listed three: “Reading,” Mark Twain in Context, ed. John Bird. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 14-23. (The best condensation of Alan Gribben’s 50 years of research into Twain’s reading.) “Mark Twain Abroad: Travel Writing,” A First Class Fool: Mark Twain and Humor, eds….
Dr. Alan Gribben, Scholar and Editor 