““And among the prissiest. Gilder’s method of raising public standards of taste and morality required the production of bloodless pages. As custodian of genteel culture he sought out the delicate and the refined and stood guard against the vulgar and the vernacular. Walt Whitman, though a personal friend, was banned from the Century’s pages; a bit of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn snuck in, but only after Gilder deleted references to nakedness, blasphemy, and smells and emended all improper phraseology (changing “in a sweat” to “worrying”).””
