The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. by CLEMENS, Samuel L. as "Mark Twain" (1835-1910)

New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885. 4to., (8 3/8 x 6 4/8 inches). Lithographic frontispiece by E.W. Kemble, photographic portrait frontispiece of the bust of Mark Twain by Karl Gerhardt, illustrations in text (browned, edges to preliminaries a bit frayed). Original green pictorial cloth, gilt (worn at the extremities, front inner hinge strengthened at an early date, shaken); preserved in a green morocco backed slipcase and chemise. Provenance: with the near contemporary ownership inscription of A.J. Snider on the front free endpaper. First American edition, preceded by the London edition of 1884, this issue with the frontispiece with "Heliotype Printing Company" and a visible tablecloth; the title-page a cancel; "with the was" on page 57; "Illustrations" leaf listing "Him and another Man" on page 88; page 155 as "15"; page 283 is bound in. "Before 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' proved to be a classic that escapes its author's definition of "a book which people praise and don't read," it pleased few literary critics, particularly not the guardians of uplift. It challenged reticence about backwoods squalor and common ignorance, and it frustrated pious clichés. For later taste, its plot staggers before finishing lamely. Yet tens of millions of readers, even of translations that lose not only the crosscutting of the vernacular but the idiomatic lilt, have delighted in its onrushing humor of character and phrasing, its escapist tableaux, its positive warmth where deserved, and its myth of inborn virtue (in 1895 Twain's notebook explained that a "sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision") along with its sardonic profiles of meanness and greed. The original plates added the minstrel-show level of the illustrations that Twain supervised. Despite that, in 1885, when racial prejudice was reestablishing itself as legal, whites could learn better from the sound heart, mind, and conscience of the runaway slave Jim" (Louis J. Budd for ANB). BAL 3415. .