Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been removed from the curriculum at a school in Philadelphia after its administration decided that “the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits”.

The classic American novel tells the story of Huck Finn, the boy first met in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, who escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and meets runaway slave Jim. Ernest Hemingway said that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. But the novel, first published in 1884, is also one of the “most-challenged of all time”, according to the American Library Association, which collates such efforts to remove books from library shelves.

First banned in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1885 as “trash and suitable only for the slums”, today it draws fire over Twain’s frequent use of the word “nigger”, which occurs more than 200 times in the text. In 2011, a publisher released a version of the novel replacing the racial slur with the word “slave” in order to “counter the ‘pre-emptive censorship’ that … has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists worldwide”.

The latest challenge comes from Friends’ Central School in Montgomery County, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which reported that the school’s administration decided to pull the novel from its 11th-grade American literature class, although it will remain in the library.

The school’s principal told parents in a letter that “we have all come to the conclusion that the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits”, saying that some students had found the “use of the N-word” to be “challenging”, and that the school “was not being inclusive”.

The school is guided by Quaker philosophy, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, and “peaceful resolution of conflicts, seeking truth, and collaboration are key aspects” of its operation.

“I do not believe that we’re censoring,” the school’s principal said. “I really do believe that this is an opportunity for the school to step forward and listen to the students.”