A new edition of Huckleberry Finn with 200 offensive race references removed is only supported by 13% of Americans says survey
The majority of Americans are opposed to the changes made to a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which saw the offensive term "nigger" expunged from the classic novel, according to a new poll.
Only 13% of Americans said they supported the change made to publisher NewSouth Books' edition of the book, first published in 1884, which substitutes Twain's 200-plus uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave", also replacing the word "injun". A Harris poll of 2,379 American adults in March found that 77% opposed the change, with 59% strongly opposing it. Conservatives, moderates and liberals were all equally likely to disagree with the change, according to the survey, while 80% of white adults were against it, as opposed to 71% of Hispanic adults and 63% of black people polled.
Publisher NewSouth Books has said that its edition is an "alternative for teachers who want to use the books in their classrooms, but are unable to present them in their original form because of pressure from parents or administrators to exclude the books".
It is not the first publisher to address the issues around a word that the book's editor, Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of Auburn University, Montgomery, says has "demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups". Last year, Dutch publisher WordBridge Publishing removed it from the title and text of Joseph Conrad's novella The Nigger of Narcissus to avoid offending "modern sensibilities", renaming the 1897 novella as The N-word of the Narcissus, also replacing the word "nigger" with "n-word" throughout the novel.
In the week in which the American Library Association released its list of the books that Americans tried hardest to ban last year, the Harris poll also shows that a small majority of Americans ? 56% ? think that no book should be banned completely. But with Stephenie Meyer's vampire romance Twilight making the top 10 of challenged books last year, 34% of Americans said that children should not be able to get books with vampires in from school libraries, while 41% believe books that include witchcraft or sorcery should not be available in school libraries.
The poll also found that 45% were against school libraries featuring books with reference to sex, 48% were against books with reference to violence and 62% were against books containing explicit language. Around a quarter felt that the Torah, Talmud and Koran should not be on school library shelves, while just 11% were against the Bible being available.
The Harris poll found that the older and less educated people were, the more likely they were to feel there were some books that should be completely banned, while political affiliations also made a difference: 73% of liberals and 60% of moderates were against banning any books, compared with 41% of conservatives.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/13/mark-twain-censorship-poll
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