This article treats the usage of the word nigger (now widely considered a racial slur) in reference to African Americans and others of African or mixed African and other ethnic origin in the art of Western culture and the English language. Literature The use of nigger in older literature has become controversial because of the word's modern meaning as a racist insult. In the title Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson, a free Negro herself. It was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1981 by literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. It is believed to be the first novel published by an African-American woman on the North American continent. In 1897, Joseph Conrad penned a novella titled The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', whose titular character, James Wait, is a West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus sailing from Bombay to London. In the United States, the novel was first published with the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, at the insistence by the publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, that no one would buy or read a book with the word "nigger" in its title, not because the word was deemed offensive but that a book about a black man would not sell. In 2009, WordBridge Publishing published a new edition titled The N-Word of the Narcissus, which also excised the word "nigger" from the text. According to the publisher, the point was to get rid of the offensive word, which may have led readers to avoid the book, and make it more accessible. Though praised in some quarters, many others denounced the change as censorship. The writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten took the opposite view to Conrad's publishers when he advised the British novelist Ronald Firbank to change the title of his 1924 novel Sorrow in Sunlight to Prancing Nigger for the American market, and it became very successful there under that title. Van Vechten, a white supporter of the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–30s), then used the word himself in his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, which provoked controversy in the black community. Of the controversy, Langston Hughes wrote: Ten Little Niggers was the original title of Agatha Christie's 1939 detective novel in the UK edition, named for a children's counting-out game familiar in England at that date. The U.S. edition,