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This is just another blip in the tradition of bowdlerization. Twain is Twain. His work lives on because it is fresh and authentic.
You wait, ten years from now, nobody will even recall this stupid edition was printed.
I'm sorry, but the antebellum South was not politically correct. Yes, they called black people niggers, which is offensive. They kept black people as slaves, too, which is infinitely more offensive than a mere slur word.
What on earth is the world coming to when we try to make the literature of previous centuries conform to our current social mores. How is this any better, or even different, than Pope Paul IV, or Pius IX, knocking the dicks off Greek and Roman statues and covering them up with plaster fig leaves in the name of public morals?
As others have said before me, you don't approve of someone's art, great: don't look at it. If you can't get past Twain's faithful use of the word nigger in a 19th-Century novel set in the antebellum South-- a novel which, by the way, teaches about mutual respect and the futility of racism-- then you are simply not mature enough to read real literature. People like that should go back to Dr. Seuss, until they grow the fuck up.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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