Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most-read and most-censored books. Since its publication in 1885, the story of the boy Huck and the runaway slave Jim has been targeted for censorship. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned the book in spring 1885, charging that the dialect used by the narrator Huck was "rough, coarse and inelegant." The New York Herald explained that the Concord Library Committee "have unanimously reached the conclusion that Huckleberry Finn is not the sort of reading matter for . . . knowledge seekers." In 1902 and 1905, the book was banned from the public libraries in Denver and Brooklyn, respectively.

By the middle of the twentieth century, many people remained concerned about the language used in Huckleberry Finn, although for different reasons than those proposed by the Concord library. With the rise of the civil rights movement...