I haven't read anywhere near all of the deluge of posts on this subject, so I apologize if the following remarks repeat what's already been said. My recent play, Mark Twain Interruption, deals at some length with the question of HF censorship, of course, but maybe it's worth repeating a thought or two. Censorship comes round every ten years or so, in normal economic times. Not just Twain, but Shakespeare and everybody else were banned from our local (Panama City, Florida) schools in 1985. We sued. By 1995, the school authorities had so nearly completely forgotten the embarrassment that they were busy at the same stand, this time censoring a high school newspaper that dared to advertise a gay rights support group. We sued again. 2005 passed without any memorable censorious event, but the country was by then firmly in thrall to the destruction of bigger fish, like Iraq, habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions. MT himself was familiar with this phenomenon and realized its value, sending thank you notes to librarians who removed HF from their shelves. Sales increase where free reading is curtailed, he knew. But what we have here, as some have noted, is not censorship but bowdlerization, and I agree with those who count it a higher crime. It's one thing to say that a writer is too dangerous to be read; that's a compliment. It's quite another to erase his work and substitute your own. Who the hell are you? Some are haunted by that schoolgirl who gets actually sick when reading the word "nigger." I had her in mind in 2008 when I wrote the play. There, Twain explains that his aim with HF is not to add to the burdens of childhood. He wishes only to add to our store of "native novels," modest works that tell a local story truly. If we have enough of these, he believed, then we have our history, not captured, perhaps, but accessible. Today, we have the comfortable pretense that we were not born in and of racism. And because we have never faced it, we continue to practice it, calling it something else. If we do not learn where we came from, then we will never triumph over racism, nor even recognize it when it comes around on its decidedly less than ten year cycle. And the words we actually used are important. That schoolgirl deserves good teachers, teachers who can help her to see that what is making her sick is not Huck, but our own history. She is the healthy one, for throwing up. Michel L. Stone STONE & SUTTON, P.A. 116 East Fourth Street Panama City, Florida 32401 (850) 785-7272 (850) 785-7094 fax <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]