Mark Twain's Classic Works Being Altered? a Sad Day in the World of American Literature

Deborah Braconnier, Yahoo! Contributor Network Jan 4, 2011 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

• More:

• Mark Twain

• tweet

• Print

FlagPost a comment

Today, as I was working on an article piece, my oldest son came home and the first words out of his mouth were, "Well, today American literature died!" Asking what he was referring to, I learned about the new edition about to be published of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer", and that these editions were going to be altered. Mark Twain's books are known for their offensive wordings, and for this reason, are banned from many schools reading lists. Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is responsible for this new edition, is quoted in New Edition Removes Mark Twain's 'offensive' words as saying, "It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers". While this may be true, Twain's words depict the language of America's past, and this past, no matter how offensive it may be to people now, is still our past. We can't alter history because we are offended by it.

Given that these changes are due to the fact that these books are being banned in schools, and given my son's first statement upon hearing the news, I decided to have a discussion with both of my 17 year old sons and see what they really thought about this action and why. Both are top students and compete in speech and debate, and both have read Mark Twain's works.

42Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency.^[1] Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

Theodore Dreiser is one of the most significant and most problematical of American writers. His place in American literary history is secure. The acknowledged "trailblazer" for a generation of early twentieth-century American writers, his rebellious commitment to the honest portrayal of American life and the vagaries of human nature placed him in the forefront of American literature about the time of World War I. The great popular and critical success of An American Tragedy in 1925 solidified his American and international reputations. But from the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser was also a byword for all that is inept in fiction and fuzzy in thinking. By the time Lionel Trilling launched his famous attack on him in 1950 (in Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, some five years after Dreiser's death), it was often assumed that Dreiser wrote like a journalist and thought like an adolescent.

43. he ambitious but immature Clyde Griffiths, raised by poor and devoutly religious parents who force him to participate in their street missionary work, is anxious to achieve better things. His troubles begin when he takes a job as a bellboy at a local hotel. The boys he meets are much more sophisticated than he, and they introduce Clyde to the world of alcohol and prostitution. Clyde enjoys his new lifestyle and does everything in his power to win the affections of the flirtatious Hortense Briggs. But Clyde's life is forever changed when a stolen car in which he's traveling kills a young child. Clyde flees Kansas City, and after a brief stay in Chicago, he reestablishes himself as a foreman at the shirt-collar factory of his wealthy long-lost uncle in Lycurgus, New York, who meets Clyde through a stroke of fortune. While remaining aloof from him as a kinsman and doing nothing to embrace him personally or advance him socially, the uncle does give Clyde a job and ultimately advances him to a position of relative importance within the factory.

Although Clyde vows not to consort with women in the way that caused his Kansas City downfall, he is swiftly attracted to Roberta Alden, a poor and innocent farm girl working under his supervision at the factory. Roberta falls in love with him. Clyde initially enjoys the secretive relationship (forbidden by factory rules) and ultimately persuades Roberta to have sex with him rather than lose him, but Clyde's ambition precludes marriage to the penniless Roberta. He dreams instead of the elegant Sondra Finchley, the daughter of a wealthy Lycurgus man and a family friend of his uncle's.

Dust jacket of early edition of An American Tragedy, published by Boni & Liveright, 1926

Having unsuccessfully attempted to procure an abortion for Roberta, who expects him to marry her, Clyde procrastinates while his relationship with Sondra continues to mature. When he realizes that he has a genuine chance to marry Sondra, and after Roberta threatens to reveal their relationship unless he marries her, Clyde hatches a plan to murder Roberta in a fashion that will seem accidental.

Clyde takes Roberta on a row boat on Big Bittern Lake in upstate New York and rows to a remote area. As he speaks to her regarding the end of their relationship, Roberta moves towards him, and he strikes her in the face with his camera, stunning her and capsizing the boat. Unable to swim, Roberta drowns while Clyde, who is unwilling to save her, swims to shore. The narrative is deliberately unclear as to whether he acted with malice and intent to murder, or if he struck her merely instinctively. However, the trail of circumstantial evidence points to murder, and the local authorities are only too eager to convict Clyde, to the point of manufacturing additional evidence against him. Following a sensational trial before an unsympathetic audience, and despite a vigorous defense mounted by two lawyers hired by his uncle, Clyde is convicted, sentenced to death, and executed. The jailhouse scenes and the correspondence between Clyde and his mother stand out as exemplars of pathos in modern literature.