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 setting. . . . It simply isn’t worth teaching because the n-word becomes the focus. Not only does it hurt feeling, but it can spark hostility. . . . I think your book is a good option and I’m glad you did it.”

MARK TWAIN EDUCATOR: “You can’t learn if you are being hurt.”

HIGH SHCOOL TEACHER: “I suspect that not one of your critics has stood before an integrated classroom. . . . I also doubt that they have seen the expressions of humiliating discomfort of students in a classroom where the novel is used as an excuse to repeat the n-word over and over (boldface added). Thank you for your efforts to return the most important novel in the American literary canon to its rightful place in high school curriculums.”

UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS: Letters came from professors of English who admitted to eliminating HUCKLEBERRY FINN from their reading lists because it required too much precious classroom time to soften the blows of the n-word (215 times in HF) by exploring its etymology and explicating Twain’s commitment as a realist author to capturing the actual speech of characters along the Mississippi River.

EDITOR ALAN GRIBBEN: “It has been over a decade since this controversy examined the n-word. One Mark Twain scholar who initially opposed my experiment wrote to admit his change of heart: ‘You saw this coming, didn’t you? That word will always be toxic.'”

4/5

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