The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. by TWAIN, Mark - 1884: Tom Sawyer's Comrade. Scene: The Mississippi Valley. Time: Forty to Fifty Years Ago. With 174 Illustrations.

London: Chatto & Windus, 1884. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn" - Ernest Hemingway First edition, preceding the first US edition by a few months, of one of the most iconic and best-loved works of American fiction and children's literature.
Initially conceived as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn "challenged reticence about backwoods squalor and common ignorance, and frustrated pious clichés. For later taste, its plot staggers before finishing lamely. Yet tens of millions of readers, even of translations that lose not only the crosscutting of the vernacular but the idiomatic lilt, have delighted in its onrushing humour of character and phrasing, its escapist tableaux, its positive warmth where deserved, and its myth of inborn virtue" (ANB). Octavo. Original red cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt, designs blocked in black on covers and spine, brown patterned endpapers. Housed in a custom black quarter morocco flat-backed cloth box by the Dragonfly Bindery, red morocco titles labels on spine. With frontispiece and illustrations throughout by E. W. Kemble. Publisher's catalogue (32 pp.) dated October 1884 at end. Spine slightly sunned, spine ends and corners of rear cover lightly bumped, trivial wear to corners and front joint of spine, a few marks to cloth, gutters of gatherings I and AA cracked with leaves a little shaken, a few marks to pp. 354-355, internally very fresh. A very good copy indeed, cloth notably bright. BAL 3414.