That entailed two things: Instead, he proposed to talk about what he wanted to talk about at any given time, to change the subject when he grew the least bit tired of it, and really to feel free to ignore chronology completely. But it should be said that we have been pondering how to edit and publish it for much longer. Indeed, most Mark Twain scholars who have seen the manuscript would tell you that it was unfinished, unorganized, and really a great unsolvable puzzle of a text, something that could not be edited in a coherent way.
Six years ago, we would have said the same thing. But we were so excited to discover that Mark Twain had actually completed his text, decided exactly how to begin and end it, how to introduce it, and most important, which of his earlier attempts to leave out. The Mark Twain Project seems like an interesting place to work. How did you end up there?
I failed my German reading exam. I was a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley. The department required that you make steady progress toward a degree, and one of the signs of such progress was to pass the foreign language reading exams [French, German, Latin] at a regular pace, which I failed to do, and which meant that I lost my job with the department as a teaching assistant.
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The Mark Twain Papers are open to the public; can you give me a couple of examples of cool artifacts a visitor would see? They could tell by the—get this—smell of the marble itself. On the afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs is shot dead by a gentleman named Colonel Sherburn; a lynch mob forms to retaliate against Sherburn; and Sherburn, surrounded at his home, disperses the mob by making a defiant speech describing how true lynching should be done.
By the third night of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople prepare for their revenge on the duke and king for their money-making scam, but the two cleverly skip town together with Huck and Jim just before the performance begins. In the next town, the two swindlers then impersonate brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. To match accounts of Wilks's brothers, the king attempts an English accent and the duke pretends to be a deaf-mute while starting to collect Wilks's inheritance.
Huck decides that Wilks's three orphaned nieces, who treat Huck with kindness, do not deserve to be cheated thus and so he tries to retrieve for them the stolen inheritance.
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In a desperate moment, Huck is forced to hide the money in Wilks's coffin, which is abruptly buried the next morning. The arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into confusion, so that the townspeople decide to dig up the coffin in order to determine which are the true brothers, but, with everyone else distracted, Huck leaves for the raft, hoping to never see the duke and king again. Suddenly, though, the two villains return, much to Huck's despair.
When Huck is finally able to get away a second time, he finds to his horror that the swindlers have sold Jim away to a family that intends to return him to his proper owner for the reward. Defying his conscience and accepting the negative religious consequences he expects for his actions—"All right, then, I'll go to hell!
Huck learns that Jim is being held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps. The family's nephew, Tom, is expected for a visit at the same time as Huck's arrival, so Huck is mistaken for Tom and welcomed into their home. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and free him; in a surprising plot twist , it is revealed that the expected nephew is, in fact, Tom Sawyer. When Huck intercepts the real Tom Sawyer on the road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his own younger half-brother, Sid , while Huck continues pretending to be Tom. In the meantime, Jim has told the family about the two grifters and the new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", and so the townspeople capture the duke and king, who are then tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.
Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, a hidden tunnel, snakes in a shed, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from adventure books he has read, [6] including an anonymous note to the Phelps warning them of the whole scheme. During the actual escape and resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg, while Jim remains by his side, risking recapture rather than completing his escape alone.
Although a local doctor admires Jim's decency, he has Jim arrested in his sleep and returned to the Phelps.
After this, events quickly resolve themselves. Jim is revealed to be a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom who already knew this chose not to reveal this information to Huck so that he could come up with an artful rescue plan for Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father Pap Finn has been dead for some time he was the dead man they found earlier in the floating house , and so Huck may now return safely to St.
Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and civilize him, he intends to flee west to Indian Territory. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted, moral, and he is not unintelligent in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters , others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word " nigger " and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance.
Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and Jim's human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience" and goes on to describe the novel as " To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him, and beat him.
When Huck escapes, he then immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially with an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim.
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Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. Mark Twain and African-American Voices , "by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery," white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core. The original illustrations were done by E. Kemble , at the time a young artist working for Life magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that:.
Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage. As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Wikipedia
When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in and after Twain lost the copyright. Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood.
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Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years.
After making a trip down the Hudson River , Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between and Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in , stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of Huck Finn three times.
He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter. A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.
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Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer.
In , the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in , opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure. In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in , Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain's already established reputation as a "professional humorist", having already published over a dozen other works.
Smith suggests that while the "dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn illustrated "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century. While it was clear that the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer , writing in The New York Times in , concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded.
Eliot and Ernest Hemingway 's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness. Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. Upon issue of the American edition in several libraries banned it from their shelves. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:. Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type.
He regards it as the veriest trash. His river novels remain required reading for young students, his social commentary and legendary aphorisms appear widely and daily on social networks. He is considered the most American of writers, and he thought of himself that way. His blistering criticisms of our politics and culture resonate today. He appealed equally to Main Street and Wall Street, spanning social, economic, and racial divides with brilliant wit and deep conviction.
Twain was, in many respects, a man outside his time. By stepping back and taking a critical look back through period images and illustrations, we can more fully appreciate his unique character and remarkable contributions.
As a visual historian, I find that my favorite Twain books are richly illustrated. We read of his encounters with Mormons and Pony Express riders, gunslingers and stagecoach drivers along his way. This is classic early Twain: The Gilded Age , the novel co-authored by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that named the era, is a wonderfully sharp satire on American manners and morals, an early guide to political corruption at the highest levels, with loving word-portraits and humorous illustrations depicting the scoundrels and speculators that drive the plot and American politics.
The river novels come next: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and 4. He saw and recalled all matter of humanity from those formative years and poured all of it into these three volumes.