New Edition Of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" & "Tom Sawyer" Removes Mark Twain's "Offensive" Words
Should we be editing era period books?

What might the long term results be? Our history as a society rests with our authors and storytellers. It would seem to me, if we edit out the history we are not comfortable with, we may be doomed to repeat it. Do we want to go the way of sanitizing our social history?

JMO

Maddad

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- A new edition of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" plans to replace the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Mark Twain had a dying wish — that the public not see his complete autobiography for 100 years.

Time's up.

"This is his uncensored work that he wanted to hold back for 100 years," said Bob Rogers, an organizer of the Mark Twain Motherlode Festival, where the unveiling will take place. "He really didn't want his family embarrassed or his friends embarrassed."

The first volume of the book will be released Saturday in Angels Camp, a tiny town that played a big part in Twain's emergence as a writer. The unveiling by the University of California Press has drawn international attention.

A few weeks ago, we published an article on the Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook. For that piece, we dug through old books to find references to how pocket notebooks had been used this past century by men in different walks of life. In the process of compiling those excerpts, we came across intriguing references to how some of the famous men of history used their pocket notebooks and decided to put together a whole post exploring that subject.

The result is this look at how 20 famous men used their pocket notebooks.