CLEMENS, Samuel (“Mark Twain,” 1835-1910). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

A bright, unsophisticated copy of the first American edition of Twain's masterpiece. Twain's follow-up novel to his classic Adventures of Tom Sawyer has eclipsed its more whimsical prequel in the American literary canon, being not only one of the first major novels written in American vernacular English but also offering a darker and more mature look at American culture, racism, and boyhood in the Antebellum South. Hemingway famously declared that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” and it has had an enduring influence on American letters. Ralph Ellison, in his essay collection Shadow and Act, writes about the novel that: "in the United States the Negro and his status have always stood for moral concern. He symbolizes among other things the human and social possibility of equality. This is the moral question raised in our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn. Jim, therefore, is not simply a slave, he is a symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town." This copy bears the following first issue points: the frontispiece bears the imprint of Heliotype Printing company and the tablecloth is visible; on page 13, the illustration captioned "Him and another" is listed at page 88; and on page 57, the 11th line from the bottom reads "with the was." The title leaf is conjugate and dated 1884; page 155 has the third "5" in a slightly larger font; and page 283 is also conjugate. BAL 3415; Grolier American 87; Johnson, pp. 43-50.

Octavo. Frontispiece by E.W. Kemble, photographic portrait of the bust of Mark Twain by Karl Gerhardt, illustrations in text. Original green gilt-decorated pictorial cloth (spine ends and tips a little rubbed). Custom quarter morocco slipcase.