Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade): A Facsimile of the Manuscript by Mark Twain (review)

Studies in American Fiction249 than can be found in either Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain or Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool" (ALR, 17 [1984], 132). Both of these reviewers are enthusiastic about the enormous shift in Mark Twain literary criticism that Our Mark Twain betokens and encourages: when the former chairman of English at Duke University and current Managing Editor of American Literature produces a book containing fifty-seven cartoons and illustrations in an attempt to understand Mark Twain's "constant efforts to shape and protect" his public personality (p. xiii), then the boundaries for permissible discussions of Twain's popular image have been abruptly broadened. English professors do occasionally bring forth studies of facets of American culture, of course, but Our Mark Twain, in part because of Budd's eminence in his field, frees future literary critics and historians to treat the writings of Twain with special emphasis on his past and present universal popularity. Budd accomplishes this by neither condescending to nor resenting Twain's obvious hunger for wide renown and his success at achieving it. Twain's notoriety as a humorist and the mass readership he attracted have presented difficulties in the past for certain commentators, who suspect the integrity and profundity of his literature precisely because of its wide, enduring appeal. Budd's book reminds us that Twain's career was simply and vastly different from Hawthorne's, Howells', or James'; the majority of Twain's writings were sold door-to door by urgently recruited armies of salespeople, and he was possibly better recognized in his day as a comic lecturer than as a serious novelist. Professors of English have often been uncertain whether to address or ignore these facts, which, along with his extravagant style of living and his addiction to venture-capitalism investments, set him off from his fellow authors. Budd's Our Mark Twain offers the antidote to this academic squeamishness: an unflinching inquiry into the familiar symbolism of a lion-maned Mark Twain, in white suit or Oxford gown, with cigar or pipe, and the process by which all such regalia came to be associated with this icon. Our Mark Twain seems entirely secure in prophesying that "Mark Twain will live on as a personality until American character and underlying human nature have changed more than we can now imagine" (p. 229). Budd has benefited all scholar-critics by investigating the reasons for the durability of Twain's legend and by documenting its sources so convincingly. University of Texas at AustinAlan Gribben Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade ): A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983. Two volumes. 725 pp. Cloth: $250. As William H. Loos discusses in his brief afterword (pp. 723-25) to this extraordinary reproduction of the Huck Finn manuscripts, the provenance of one of the most important documents in American literary history is fraught with irony. James Fraser Gluck, an attorney and curator of the Young Men's Association Library in Buffalo, had written to Mark Twain to request the manuscript of Life on the Mississippi for the developing collection of literary documents he was assembling. The response was a disappointment, for when he opened the package from Hartford in November of 1885 he found not what he had requested but part of the manuscript (487 leaves) of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn instead. At a later date he received another package containing 209 leaves. These two shipments, constituting about three-fifths of the total novel, roughly Chapters 12—14 250Reviews and Chapter 22 to the conclusion, are all that have survived of the initial composition of the most celebrated book in American letters. But what has survived is a valuable record indeed, and, combined with surrounding correspondence and related documents, it provides an intriguing history of the troubled drafting of Twain's most important book. Curiosities abound for scholars of all persuasions , from Twain's note on the back of the very first page that the printer should "follow general style of Prince &c Pauper—& send no proof" to the publication of the novel by Twain's own company, presided over by his nephew, Charles L. Webster, who...