Making Huck Finn Safe for School Again (Ep. 47)

<p>“All modern American literature,” Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Despite such accolades, this masterwork from Twain — the pen name used by Samuel Clemens — has been slowly disappearing from American classrooms, a development primarily driven by the novel’s repeated use — 219 times in all — of that uniquely offensive term that we uneasily refer to as the N-word.</p> <p>Defending an "unteachable" classic of American literature has become the life’s work of a Twain scholar, costing him professionally and personally.</p>