We've got a Costo membership, a remnant of my husband's bachelor days. He'd make a monthly run to stock up on gigantic sizes of everything; now I go there for what I call targeted shopping. I know exactly what I want, how I'll store/use it, and how much I'm saving over the local 99-Cent store. In addition, we get the Costco magazine. It's got a monthly "Informed Debate" section, often about issues on which I have no strong opinion. This month, however, asks, "Should literary classics be sanitized?"
The case in point was the recent publication of Huckleberry Finn with certain words expunged. The "expert" advancing the "Yes" opinion was Alan Gribben, a professor at Auburn University in Alabama who "helped produce the NewSouth Edition." He not only justifies replacing nigger with slave but goes on to say, "Would Mark Twain approve of making this change? No one can be certain..." and adds that Twain was such a commercial writer that he'd want his work to reach the widest possible audience and that necessitates "sidestepping" "the n-word acrimony."*
I'm outraged by the rewriting of a published work according to someone else's political or social agenda.
