Publishers Weekly posted an article by Marc Schultz today titled, "Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' Eliminates the 'N' Word". The reason? Teachers aren't reading it in classes anymore even though it is one of the definitive works of American literature. Should publishers and editors be allowed to change writers' words? And would Twain want the word changed if it meant another generation of children read his story? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think the choice to "update" Finn and make him politically correct is an intriguing and controversial idea. Perhaps that's the point.

Below are excerpts from Schultz's article. You may read the entire piece here .

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."

Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."