Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (censored)

The pitch

This is the same novel, the same 1885 first-edition text, and the same 174 E. W. Kemble engravings as our standard edition — with one change. Every instance of the racial slur has been replaced. If the language is what stands between your family or your classroom and this book, this is the version that removes that obstacle.

What changed, exactly

The slur appears 212 times in what Twain wrote. In 205 of them it is replaced with “slave”, which is the conventional substitution and the one the 2011 NewSouth edition used. The remaining seven are replaced with “black man”, because “slave” would make nonsense of them: six occur in Pap’s drunken rant in chapter six, which is entirely about a free Black college professor from Ohio who votes and whom the law will not let anyone sell — the outrage Pap is expressing depends on the man being free. The seventh is the last chapter’s line about Tom taking all that trouble to set a free man free. Nothing else in the text is altered: not the violence, not the dialect, not Twain’s own front matter, not a comma of anyone’s speech.

We think you should know this is an edit, and we’d rather say so plainly than let a reader assume they are holding what Twain published. It is a legitimate edition and a contested one, and both of those things are worth telling a young reader.

What to know

Everything true of the original is still true here: it is the hardest book on this site, it asks to be heard rather than scanned, and it belongs to grade 9 and up. The family discussion guide and the book-versus-movie comparison were written against the standard edition text and apply unchanged to this one — see the book club questions and the book vs. movie page. One practical note: the audiobook and paperback linked above are the unaltered text, because no censored audio or print edition exists.

Life when written

Twain started it in 1876, immediately after finishing Tom Sawyer, then stalled and left the manuscript alone for years. What restarted it was going back: in 1882 he travelled the Mississippi again as a passenger on the river he had once piloted, and found the steamboat world of his boyhood mostly gone. The book he finished looks back at the 1840s, when slavery was legal in Missouri and a boy like Huck would have grown up understanding Jim as someone else’s property — which is the assumption the whole novel is built to take apart. It was published in Britain in December 1884 and in America in February 1885 by Charles L. Webster & Company, Twain’s own firm. Within weeks the public library in Concord, Massachusetts had banned it as coarse and unsuitable, and Twain wrote cheerfully to his publisher that this would sell them several thousand extra copies.