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It has always been a mystery to me that a novel as hardhearted and as heartbreaking as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--at least its first three quarters, before even Mark Twain's nerve failed him--should be considered suitable to be read by teenagers in the classroom. I defy any adult to reread it and not be stopped cold by the bleakness of its equation of the plight of slaves and of children. The use of the word "nigger" is the least of it.
So, the attempts to expurgate Twain's language to make the novel suitable for a public school curriculum are beside the point as far as I am concerned. This is not a text for children. NBC's Mike Taibbi and CBS' Mark Strassmann cover the controversy anyway. An anodyne Taibbi blandly calls the novel "the rich tale of the adventures and friendships shared by two characters, one white and one black," which is the half of it.
When I was at high school, King Lear was an assigned text--another incomprehensible conception of the worldview of a 17-year-old boy.
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