Which is why I laugh when the article quotes Twain writing "tend to them constantly, and keep a pure heart," as if that's Twain moralizing, when it's much more likely he would have delivered that line with delightful irony.
Ugh. Is anyone else put off by the modern-day collaborator, based upon this article?
If you're getting involved with a Mark Twain project, you have to know ahead of time that you're going back 150 years to a time when slavery was still a thing, racism against the natives was still prevalent, etc., and on top of it, Twain was at times trying to be intentionally provocative even in that environment. You either take that body of work and look at it in its historical context, or you stay the heck away from it. Sounds like they couldn't resist the urge to sanitize the unsavory parts of history.
"The novelist and essayist David Bradley, Jr., has written and lectured widely about Twain and race. “Was he a racist? Wasn’t he a racist? It’s sort of amusing,” Bradley, who is black, told me recently. “That question isn’t asked of most other American writers, and I think that’s because Twain actually did something about race, and most of them didn’t.”"
Apologies for the soft paywall: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the...
Original authorship? Or am I misunderstanding what you're getting at? (It wouldn't be the first time :)
I agree that "forgery" doesn't quite seem right for this, although it's close. If they had claimed to have an original Twain work that was being published unedited, but was in fact a new creation, then it would fit, but they're not really hiding the fact that it's been altered.... "Appropriation" and "misrepresentation" both fit, but are overly general.