did i forget to post? sheesh....
here's a link to an excerpt from the editor's foreword via newsouth books:
Introduction to Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition by Alan Gribben
if you look at this, the edit comes out of an expediency the editor had been using in college courses when reading some passages out loud.
the foreword is (obviously) included in the edition. it's inclusion makes this into something other than simply censorship---it's not like stalin ordering the doctoring of photos of the politburo to eliminate executed members, to erase them from the present's version of the past.
so what this is has been framed wrong in the passage from editor to publisher to usa today.
here's why: if you look at the excerpt, it addresses questions of ""historical veracity" and "fidelity to context" directly, and then makes an argument which basically says that the problems associated with these epithets is of an entirely different order. at stake, in his view, is the marginalization of the texts themselves and this because these terms generate so much static that (a) the texts are not getting assigned and (b) when they are assigned, you have to fight through these nouns to get to anything else.
so he made the substitution that he had been making in classrooms and lectures for a long time.
and because the foreword is included in the book (obviously) it makes of all these questions topics for debate. so it's rather the opposite of censorship. it's simply an editorial decision with a rationale provided.
i don't particularly agree with it, but mostly on the grounds that the word "slave" is jarring as an alternative. twain was a lot about sound and a lot about the sound of words. i'm not sure this respects that.
there's a lot of hyperbole in this thread. you'd do well to consider the foreword....