[snip] All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the [here Hemingway uses a racist term for African Americans] Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. [/snip]· Ernest Hemingway, "The Green Hills of Africa" (1935) ·
I read Huckleberry Finn to my young son back in the day. He was 5 or 6 I suppose. The first time I came to the word nigger I explained it to my son, and that today it is impolite to use that old-fashioned term. I told him we could use the original wording or a substitute like “slave” or “black”, but it was up to him. We used the term slave.
It is so crazy to ban a book because of an outdated word when the book is about the friendship between a black man and a white boy who is trying to help him escape from slavery.