Should the N-word be taken out of Huck Finn? Dr. Alan Gribben talks about why he changed the words of the greatest American writer.

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Episode #26
Guest: Dr. Alan Gribben
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Attribution: Bob Englehart, Caglecartoons.com

In this episode I speak to Dr. Alan Gribben about how and why he felt justified in changing the words of arguably the greatest American writer. We also cover:

• How commerical Mark Twain was (did you know he was the essentially the first self-published author?)
• Michael Chabon’s article about reading both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to his young children and what he did about reading the N-word aloud
• How native American Debbie Reese feels about the change of “injun” to “indian”
• The very interesting introduction to the new edition
• What sounds like a great teacher who created a Flow Day for his students so they could understand about the language in Huck Finn
• How has the publicity effected NewSouth, the publisher of this new edition
• Why Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are categorized in different parts of the library, as kid’s book vs. young adult or adult fiction 
• What if people become uncomfortable teaching the holocaust, should we take references to that out of books?
• His article in PW called Trouble on the Raft