Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - photo 1

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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$ 52 920
Auction dateClassic
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
USA, New York
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ID 967648
Lot 158 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain, 1885

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



The exceptionally fine Swann 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 of the portrait leaf and pp. 13 and 57, and third states of pp. 155 and 283. Blank leaf 23/8 is present at the end; the title leaf is a cancel with 1884 copyright date. 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. Original gilt-decorated pictorial cloth; modern box. Provenance: Arthur Swann, 1875-1959, auctioneer and bibliophile (bookplate).

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15.06.2023
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