Twain Scholar Alan Gribben Eulogized For Rescuing ‘Huckleberry Finn’ From Mark Twain

Alan Gribben, the indefatigable scholar who devoted the latter decades of his academic life to the staggering task of tracking down every volume in Mark Twain’s personal library in order to retroactively cure the author’s most famous novel of its own historical context, died last month at the age of 84.

It is a profound, perhaps insurmountable tragedy of the American academy that Gribben, who so valiantly took up the red pen to scrub the linguistic unpleasantries from ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ in his widely contested 2011 edition, will not live to sanitize the remainder of the Western canon; a loss of custodial vision not seen since the anonymous clerics of sixteenth-century Antwerp so graciously relieved Erasmus of his more exhausting puns, or, indeed, since the visionary studio executives at 20th Century Fox meticulously sanded down the existential dread inherent to the first act of ‘Garfield: The Movie’.

Gribben understood, as few modern philologists and virtually none of the unwashed reading public seem capable of grasping, that a foundational text of American literature is simply too important to be left to the erratic whims of its creator; Twain’s stubborn, vulgar insistence on capturing the ugly vernacular realities of the antebellum South had for too long rendered the book a frightful inconvenience to middle-school curriculum coordinators, who prefer their nineteenth-century history to arrive pre-laundered of its actual horrors.