Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.—
By Order of the Author per G.G., Chief of Ordnance
—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The discovery in 1991 of the lost half of the manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—some 665 holograph pages in the hand of its author, Samuel L. Clemens— was one of those chance events in the literary world that electrify scholars who are always waiting for the big find. In the case of Huck Finn, the already-known part of the manuscript had since 1885 reposed in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in upstate New York. It was donated to the library by its sometime curator, James Fraser Gluck, who had asked Twain for the manuscript, much as we ask for autographs today. Afterward Twain was to learn the monetary value of his papers, and he regularly sold them to wealthy collectors like J. P. Morgan. But in 1885 he was simply flattered by the request and obliged by sending Gluck all the handwritten leaves he could find—the text of the last half of the novel. “I have hunted the house over, and that is all I can find,” he told Gluck. The first half, he said, must have been “sent to the printers, who never returned it.”
Some months
