Responding in 1902 to being informed that the Omaha Public
Library had banned Huckleberry Finn from
its juvenile section because of its potential bad influence on the minds of
young boys, Mark Twain is reported to have replied: I am tearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm. It has started a
number of hitherto spotless people to reading Huck Finn, out of a natural human
curiosity to learn what this is all about—people who had not heard of him
before; people whose morals will go to wreck and ruin now. The publishers are
glad but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry. I should be sorry
to think it was the publishers themselves that got up this entire little
flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their
cellars, but you never can tell what a publisher will do. I have been one
myself.
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