Aaron Tracy

The BFG?

His famous cloak is no longer black.

In fact, and this is real, the words black and white were systematically deleted throughout Dahl's catalog, even when describing something like the color of snow.

The very words black and white are treated as problematic.

So how did these changes even come about?

According to the New York Times, they were made after Dahl's estate hired a consultancy group to evaluate his work.

The consultant's aim was to promote inclusion and accessibility in children's literature.

Needless to say, fans of Dahl's and free speech advocates and many others were completely freaked out.

To take just two examples, the writer Salman Rushdie called the revisions absurd censorship.

Best-selling writer Philip Pullman said it would be better to let Dahl's books go out of print than to alter them without the author's consent.

And that's kind of the big issue, right?

That these alterations were made without Dahl's approval.

He was long dead, so he didn't have the option of signing off on them.

Digging into this, I found a bunch of fascinating, similar examples of artist estates grappling with this sort of thing.

According to the New York Times again, Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist of all time, had her books altered after her death too.

The truly galling title of her top-selling book was changed to, And Then There Were None.

Christie's great-grandson says that without that change, it would probably be completely unpublishable now.

He's not wrong.

Similarly, an edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, arguably the great American novel, replaced a racial epithet throughout the text over concerns that such an offensive word was causing schools to stop assigning the book.

Dr. Seuss's estate took a different tack and just stopped publishing half a dozen of his books because of the racial and ethnic stereotypes in them.