Mark Twain Official Curator Speaks Out on Removing the N Word from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn

The Hutchinson Report

January 8, 2010

Henry Sweets, the Curator for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, will discuss the controversy over the removal of the N word from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on the Hutchinson Report, on KPFK Radio 90.7FM streamed on kpfk.com, on Saturday, January 8, Noon to 1:00PM PST. The announcement by NewSouth Books that it would remove the N word from the novel in mid-February has stirred intense debate over Twain, his works, racism, and the use of controversial racially loaded words in literature and beyond.

“The debate rages over whether the removal of racially pejorative words from classic literature such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is a needed change for the times or racial and political correctness run amok” says Hutchinson Report Host Earl Ofari Hutchinson, “This is the issue that the official custodian of Twains’ works will weigh in on.”