Portrait of “Mark Twain at age 55” by Charles Noël Flagg on the cover of “Life Magazine,” December 20, 1968.
This issue of Life contains an unpublished manuscript by Mark Twain, “Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” in which American fiction’s most famous boys set off on a wild adventure they never finished.
From the magazine editor’s introduction to the piece:
“From his summer retreat near Elmira, N.Y. on July 6, 1884, Mark Twain sent his business manager a request for some books – ‘personal narratives of life and adventure out yonder on the Plains and in the Mountains. I mean to take Huck Finn out there.’ The books came and on July 15 Twain noted in his journal that he was writing about Huck and Tom Sawyer ‘among the Indians 40 or 50 years ago.’
“The boys’ adventure is a vivid tale of captivity, torture, murder, pursuit and vengeance – all classic elements in western fiction, in this case enhanced by the master hand of America’s greatest story-teller. But Twain never finished it. After 18,000 words the story simply breaks off in mid-sentence, never to be completed and never, until now, to be published . . .”
Portrait of “Mark Twain at age 55” by Charles Noël Flagg on the cover of “Life Magazine,” December 20, 1968.
This issue of Life contains an unpublished manuscript by Mark Twain, “Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” in which American fiction’s most famous boys set off on a wild adventure they never finished.
From the magazine editor’s introduction to the piece:
“From his summer retreat near Elmira, N.Y. on July 6, 1884, Mark Twain sent his business manager a request for some books – ‘personal narratives of life and adventure out yonder on the Plains and in the Mountains. I mean to take Huck Finn out there.’ The books came and on July 15 Twain noted in his journal that he was writing about Huck and Tom Sawyer ‘among the Indians 40 or 50 years ago.’
“The boys’ adventure is a vivid tale of captivity, torture, murder, pursuit and vengeance – all classic elements in western fiction, in this case enhanced by the master hand of America’s greatest story-teller. But Twain never finished it. After 18,000 words the story simply breaks off in mid-sentence, never to be completed and never, until now, to be published . . .”