The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.

People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.

Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?

I have always felt that that passage more than any other story sums up the spirit of the USA.

I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).

" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."

How about Harry Potter?

Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.

Times change but people don't.

I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.

I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.

I remember those reading circles in first grade. I got bored waiting for kids to stammer out the sentences, and read the rest of the book. The teacher at one point asked what might happen next? I blurted out the rest of the plot. The teacher angrily told me I wasn't allowed to read ahead.

I used to get in trouble doing that because I'd never look at the book.

I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.

Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!

And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.