
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 14, 1991                   TAG: 9102140180
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Short

`HUCK' ORIGINAL TEXT UNCOVERED IN ATTIC

The handwritten first half of the original text of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," lost for more than a century, has been found in a an attic trunk, Sotheby's auction house said Wednesday.

The 665-page document is especially significant because it varies widely from the published text. Twain scholars said it was an extraordinary literary discovery, one that will stir fresh debate over one of the world's most studied books.

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called `Huckleberry Finn,' " Ernest Hemingway once wrote.

"If you had to pick a single lost manuscript you would like to find, you would pick the first half of `Huckleberry Finn.' We never believed it would be found," said Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," published in 1884, is the tale of an incorrigible boy who escapes from "civilization" on a Mississippi raft with a slave named Jim. It is widely regarded as a foundation of American writing.

The second half of Twain's book has been at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library since the 1880s. Twain sent it there at the request of James Fraser Gluck, a benefactor of the library's predecessor. Gluck had asked Twain for the original of Twain's "Life on the Mississippi." That wasn't available, so Twain sent "Huck."

Twain wrote Gluck in 1885 that the original first half had been destroyed at the printer. He found it in 1887 and sent it; its whereabouts had since been unknown.

Then last fall, Gluck's granddaughter found it in her attic.

by CNB