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 le ...

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