NEW YORK -- The long separated manuscript of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was reunited Tuesday for the first time since leaving the possession of author Mark Twain over 100 years ago.
The missing first half of the handwritten manuscript was put together with the second half belonging to a Buffalo, N.Y., library, at Sotheby's auction house at a presentation ceremony attended by two sisters who have given the first half to the same library.
Sotheby experts announced the discovery of the first portion in February 1991 after Mrs. Barbara Testa of Los Angeles, a granddaughter of James Fraser Gluck, a 19th century Buffalo attorney and collector, discovered it in a family trunk in her California attic two years ago. She brought it to the auction house for identification.
Gluck gave the 685-page second half to the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library many years ago, according to Testa, who was accompanied by her sister, Mrs. Pamela Lindholme, a horse breeder of Manassas, Va. Why the manuscript was separated is a mystery that may never be solved, said Testa, a children's librarian at Hollywood Library.
'The minute I found it in the trunk, I had a sort of feeling about it,' she said. 'I checked the first page of it with the first page of a printed copy of the book, then I checked the handwriting with a copy of Twain's handwriting at the library.
'By that time I was pretty sure it was the Twain manuscript and my sister and I decided to send it to Sotheby's for authentication by their experts.'
David Redden, director of Sotheby's book and manuscript division, said reunification of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed novels ever written by an American author, is 'an extremely exciting event for the public and for Twain scholars.'
The manuscript written in ink on note paper is particularly important to scholars, Redden said, because it varies significantly from the published text and contains important corrections, deletions and additions.
Donald Cloudsley, director of the Buffalo library, accepted the manuscript and said it would be the centerpiece of a special exhibition room devoted to Samuel Clemens, who used Twain as his nom-de-plume.
Published in 1884, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was written between 1876 and 1883 and was intended as a sequal to Twain's 'The Adventures of Tom Saywer,' to which it is considered superior as a work of literature.
Finn, considered Twain's keenest observer of the follies and hypocrisies of pre-Civil War American frontier society, has always been considered a white youth who flees the restrictions of 'civilization' on a Mississippi River raft with an escaped slave named Jim.
Twain experts are now assessing a recent scholarly suggestion that a loquacious young black acquaintance who had charmed Twain was the prototype for Finn. Finn's speech patterns have been likened to the lingo of young, uneducated blacks of the day as recorded by Twain in an early unpublished manuscript.
