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…
Category: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition
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…
“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.
Silent Censorship and Huckleberry Finn
In “Silent Censorship and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ” Alan Gribben’s self-interview “is perhaps the perfect ‘flagship’ essay for the present volume [Censored & Banned Literature]. Anyone who reads the entire book will see that issues of race and ethnicity have increasingly become the central issues (besides graphic descriptions of sexual behavior) in…
The N-Word in the Classroom
“Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” Dropped by School District Over N-word”—one version of headlines on February 8, 2018 in USA Today, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Washington Post, and other newspapers. These headlines referred to the schools in Duluth, Minnesota, but similar decisions are occurring elsewhere. To say that the n-word is controversial today…
“Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Expelled: Censorship and the Classroom” (2017 essay)
“Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Expelled: Censorship and the Classroom,” Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. R. Kent Rasmussen (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2017), pp. 65-80. Link to Critical Insights book “Professor Gribben himself recounts, for the first time at length in print, the full story of the NewSouth editions. He also discusses the impact…
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…
Dr. Alan Gribben, Scholar and Editor 