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

"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. Defending an "unteachable" classic of American literature has become the life's work of a Twain scholar, costing him professionally and personally.