Twain remains censored — and uncensored

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Mark Twain was the kind of man who might tell an off-color joke, then grievously apologize, who wrote stories and essays he knew would offend and kept others private for the same reason.

A century after his death, Mark Twain remains censored, and uncensored.

The author and humorist worried enough about what he could say in public to withhold anti-religion essays and to forbid his autobiography from being published until 100 years after his death. The first of three planned volumes of the unexpurgated version, released in 2010 and including harsh words for American business and military actions, became a surprise best-seller that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

But Twain also believed in getting out the truth. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” angered respectable people when it came out and still stirs a fuss 126 years later. Twain’s most famous novel has been paired with “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” in a volume to be published next month by NewSouth Books that replaces the “N-word” — an offensive but often-used expression in the 1880s — with “slave.”

“He was profoundly a Victorian gentleman, or tried to be,” says Twain biographer Ron Powers. “It mattered to him if his wife approved of what he wrote and he was eager to please the public. But there were categories, like race, before which he was intrepid. In San Francisco before the Civil War, he was run out of town because he was criticizing the police for beating up Chinese people.”

“He walked a line where you could fall off on either side, to be much too conservative or by going so far that what you think is funny is not funny,” says Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley, where the autobiography was edited, then released by the University of California Press.

“He said early on that the only criticism he’s interested in is that of the great general public,” Hirst said.

“Huckleberry Finn” comes as close as any book to the elusive status of “The Great American Novel.” But its frank narrative about manners, race and rebellion in pre-Civil War time makes it an uncomfortable classic.

When first published, “Huckleberry Finn” was criticized for advocating bad behavior, for being a “coarse book not likely to set a good example for the young,” says Justin Kaplan, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Twain biography.

Over the years, as values changed, so did the objections. The N-word led to the book’s being removed from class readings lists. Some of the novel’s closing scenes, when Huck and Tom delay freeing the slave Jim and place rats and snakes in his shed, have baffled historians as cruel and gratuitous.

Altered literary works have been around a long time, especially during the 19th century, when Victorian standards led to sanitized Shakespeare. For decades, the Loeb Classical Library published watered-down versions of Greek and Roman texts, only to reverse itself after the 1960s and put back in the dirty words of Aristophanes and others. In the late 1990s, a new edition of Aesop’s Fables showed a far bawdier side than simple tales such as “The Tortoise and the Hare.”

“Huckleberry Finn” has long been out of copyright and subject to the wishes of anyone who cares to release it. The standard text for “Huckleberry Finn” is available through numerous publishers, but other versions are around. An edition without the N-word for grade-schoolers, “retold from the original,” is part of Sterling’s Classic Starts Series, which includes books by Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jonathan Swift.

“The books were abridged in a number of ways to make them appropriate for a third- and fourth-grade reader — length, sentence structure, difficult vocabulary and issues that might be too sensitive or confusing for a young reader,” says Frances Gilbert, vice president and publisher of Sterling Children’s Books.

An edited “Huckleberry Finn,” issued through Signet Classics, restores a chapter about rafting from the original manuscript and condenses other scenes.

John Wallace, a teacher at the Mark Twain Intermediate School in northern Virginia, published a version of “Huck Finn” about 20 years ago that used “slave” rather than the N-word.

Scholars have objected strongly to the “Huckleberry-Tom Sawyer” edition from NewSouth, which is based in Montgomery, Ala. Twain biographer Kaplan said he was offended and “bitterly amused.” Powers calls the changes an “abomination” and a disservice to education.