New ‘Finn’ To Include Deleted Text
Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the American classic that still sells a million copies every year, is coming out in a new edition containing four new passages dropped before the novel was published in 1885.
The new passages came to light in Twain’s original manuscript of the first half of the novel, discovered six years ago, and their addition to the text now has literary scholars buzzing.
Not only do the new texts enhance the Huck Finn story, but their deletion 101 years ago sheds light on how a major writer worked and made decisions.
“It’s just enormous fun to be able to watch a master at work,” said Justin Kaplan of Cambridge, Mass., a Twain scholar and author of the introduction to the new Random House edition, out this month. “You can see him thinking on the page, adding texture, refining his classic characters.”
The lost-and-found story of the Twain manuscript is similar to that of the manuscript of an early novel by Louisa May Alcott discovered in the stacks of a Harvard University library, which is now being offered for publication.
The Twain text is a 665-page, heavily edited manuscript of the first half of the book. It was lost after Twain sent it to a Buffalo lawyer who sought it for the city’s library. The lawyer, James Gluck, apparently took it home to read and never returned it to the library.
His granddaughters found it in a steamer truck in their attic in San Francisco in 1990.
Among the new passages is a key one that “enlarges the role of Jim,” the runaway slave who accompanies Huck Finn on the mythic raft trip down the Mississippi River, said Kaplan, author of the Pulitzer-winning biography “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.”
The passage is an extended monologue by Jim, a ghost story he tells about an experience in a morgue. It would have appeared early in the book and, said Kaplan, shows that Jim had once worked for a doctor and “been given a position of trust.”
“It’s a hell of a lot of fun,” said Kaplan, although he added that he agrees with Twain’s decision to remove it from the novel before it was published in 1885. “It really breaks up the narrative,” he said. “You can hear Twain saying, ‘It’s good, but it doesn’t belong.”’
A second passage recounts Huck Finn’s adventures with a group of raftsmen after he sneaks aboard their raft one night. It was cut to make “Huckleberry Finn” the same length as “Tom Sawyer,” so the two novels could be sold as a set. Twain used a tamer, less-earthy version in “Life on the Mississippi.”
The two other passages deleted before the original publication are an expanded version of a religious camp meeting scene and a satirical passage about Christians who support overseas charities but ignore the needs of people in their own communities.
Twain, said Kaplan, probably eliminated them “because he had an eye out for his audience” and thought these passages would be offensive.
In the new edition, the four new passages are set off by double rules. In an addendum, Twain scholar Victor Doyno discusses the specific changes Twain made in the text before publication as well as the significance of the four new passages.
In court papers, the manuscript has been valued at $1.5 million. The Twain heirs and the Mark Twain Foundation will share in the proceeds from the sale of book and film rights, while the manuscript will be reunited with that of the second half of the book in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.