I, too, was born in 1958. I used to be nearsighted, but now my distance vision is normal, while my close vision deteriorates. I'm bald on top, which you aren't, but I'm not at all sensitive about it. I like to joke about being old. When people like to insist that I'm not, I'll correct myself to "oldish." ;-) I'm also a white male, which I guess in some people's estimations makes me evil, but I don't pay them much mind.

I agree that we shouldn't be sanitizing the works of past authors. It may in some cases be appropriate to provide content warnings and contextual information to help readers understand why writers chose to write as they did, but vandalizing the works of others--even if some aspects of those works may be distasteful to us today--is not the answer.

I'm reminded of how two particular writers responded to others changing their works. Harlan Ellison famously stood on Gene Roddenberry's desk with a noose in his hand and snarled, "Tell me somebody didn't change my words!" when he found out that Roddenberry had given his original script for "City on the Edge of Forever" to another writer to fix. (The original, while brilliant, wasn't true to the Star Trek universe.) Ray Bradbury, when faced with readers suggesting that he needed more female characters in certain of his stories, replied (more or less; I'm doing this from probably flawed memory), "I wrote what I wrote. If you want something different, you write it." He was also incensed when he discovered that certain of his works had been issued, without his permission, in slightly sanitized editions for high school readers. It's easy to say that a dead author would have approved of cleansing, but living writers have a tendency not to approve, and I think it's likely the ghosts of many of them would not, either, even if they might write it differently today.

I find it curious that so many people are so willing to jump on the sanitizing bandwagon while, simultaneously, it's become de rigueur to flood works with obscenities, even in works intended for younger readers/viewers. We've been asked to de-sensitize ourselves to foul language, much of which is used either as vile insult or empty filler (and thus bad writing, although editors now seem routinely turn a blind eye to it), but other terms, which are often no less insulting but some of which are fairly mild by comparison, are regularly excised. The taste police are fickle beasts, it seems.

In my own writing, there are certain terms I never use and some I will only use after considerable thought. There are terms that make me flinch, and some books I probably would toss away in disgust. But works that originated in a different era with different views and sensibilities shouldn't be forced to conform to us today. For one thing, they can teach us a lot (as you've said) about where we came from, how we've evolved, and maybe even where we are going. For another, I'm not sure I'd want to be the one facing the Ghost of Writers Past wielding a noose and snarling, "Tell me somebody didn't change my words!" ;-)