“Censorship” is normally defined as prohibiting the publication, sale, or reading of a work and having the enforcement of governmental mandate behind that policy. The accusation that I was practicing “censorship” misses the point that I have devised a means by which these novels can return to the public school classrooms from which they are currently barred.

My edition has no state or institutional power behind it. As Randall Williams of NewSouth Books said, “What we have done is translation, not censorship. Our translation has not deprived anyone of reading Twain’s original language, now did our translation affect the millions of copies of the work already in circulation or yet to come.” —Alan Gribben

BELOW: NewSouth Books has published six volumes of Twain’s boy book novels. No censorship here. Books are available on Amazon or from the University of Georgia Press https://ugapress.org/imprints/newsouth-books/

Translating a racial slur did not “sanitize” enslavement from the book or “censor” the book from circulation.

BELOW: People magazine, Jan 24, 2011

The use of the n-word (215 times) in HUCKLEBERRY FINN, a novel set in the 1840s, was historically accurate and in keeping with the AMERICAN REALISM movement of which Twain was a proponent.