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

A lovely, unrestored 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." First state title-leaf dated 1885, first state of the portrait, and first states of pp. 13 and 57; third states of pp. 155 and 283. Blank leaf 23/8 is present at the end. 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 (BAL state 1), illustrations in text (front hinge starting, some spotting internally, a few leaves chipped at margins). Original gilt-decorated pictorial cloth (foot of spine rubbed, corners just showing). Custom quarter morocco slipcase.