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Lot Essay
A bright, unsophisticated copy of the first American edition of Twain's masterpiece, with Vanderbilt family provenance dated in the year of publication.
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, "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 ownership inscription of William Henry Vanderbilt, Junior, on front free endpaper: "W.H. Vanderbilt, Jr. April 11th 1885. 1 West 57th St. New York City. U.S.A." William, the eldest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), attended Yale University before being tragically struck by typhoid fever, dying at the age of 21 on 23 May 1892. The Vanderbilt home at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and West 57th Street was constructed in 1883 and is, to this date, the largest private house ever built in New York City. Spanning an entire city block, it stood until 1926 when widowed Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt was forced to sell. The Gilded Age mansion was then demolished and replaced by the Bergdorf Goodman Building.
The present copy is an early state and contains the following first issue points: the frontispiece bears the imprint of Heliotype Printing Company and the tablecloth is visible; on p.13, the illustration captioned "Him and another" is listed at p.88; and on p.57, the 11th line from the bottom reads "with the was". The title leaf is a cancel and dated 1884; p.155 has the third "5" in a slightly larger font; and p.283 is also a cancel. BAL 3415; Grolier American 87; Johnson, pp. 43-50.
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, "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 ownership inscription of William Henry Vanderbilt, Junior, on front free endpaper: "W.H. Vanderbilt, Jr. April 11th 1885. 1 West 57th St. New York City. U.S.A." William, the eldest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), attended Yale University before being tragically struck by typhoid fever, dying at the age of 21 on 23 May 1892. The Vanderbilt home at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and West 57th Street was constructed in 1883 and is, to this date, the largest private house ever built in New York City. Spanning an entire city block, it stood until 1926 when widowed Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt was forced to sell. The Gilded Age mansion was then demolished and replaced by the Bergdorf Goodman Building.
The present copy is an early state and contains the following first issue points: the frontispiece bears the imprint of Heliotype Printing Company and the tablecloth is visible; on p.13, the illustration captioned "Him and another" is listed at p.88; and on p.57, the 11th line from the bottom reads "with the was". The title leaf is a cancel and dated 1884; p.155 has the third "5" in a slightly larger font; and p.283 is also a cancel. BAL 3415; Grolier American 87; Johnson, pp. 43-50.