Alan Gribben is a professor emeritus of English at Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama and a Mark Twain scholar.
[1] Gribben published a new combined edition of Twain's Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) with NewSouth Books in February 2011.
He added:For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always recoiled from uttering the racial slurs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom and Huck.
Students and audience members seemed to prefer this expedient, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed.
He suggested that Twain himself, "probably our most commercially minded author ever", might not be displeased with "a revision that would reinsert his boy books back into school classrooms and gain new readers", and cited a number of positive responses he received from teachers.