December 10, 1884: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, under his pen name, Mark Twain.
He had been born on November 30, 1835, in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River, while Halley's Comet was making its closest pass to Earth on its 75 1/2-year trip around the Sun. Sam Clemens would go on to do a lot of things with his life, including work on riverboats, drive a wagon on a westward wagon train, and write for newspapers from coast to coast.
From his work on riverboats, he took the pen name Mark Twain. "Mark" meaning distance and "Twain" meaning "two," the combined meaning of "Mark Twain" was, roughly, the point at which water became safe to travel -- or unsafe. And he did often seem to live his life on the border between safe and unsafe -- but also on the border between America's slaveholding South and its abolitionist North, and on the border between its established East and its then-wide-open, freewheeling "Wild West."
William Faulkner called him "The Father of American Literature," based mainly on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, the 1st major American novel written on a typewriter; and its sort-of sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884.
Tom Sawyer was set in St. Petersburg, Missouri, based on Hannibal, in the 1840s, before the American Civil War. Slavery was still in effect. One day, Tom, about 12 years old at the time, skips school to go swimming, and is made to whitewash his mean old Aunt Polly's fence for the entirety of the next day, Saturday, as punishment. He cons the other neighborhood kids, who adore him, into doing it for him -- perhaps inspiring the late 20th Century character Ferris Bueller. And, just as Ferris faked having a terrible, if ill-defined, illness, Tom fakes his own death, and attends his own funeral, before he's discovered to be alive.
He meets Becky Thatcher, a girl who has just moved to town with her father, a circuit-riding judge. And his best friend is Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, whose father is the town drunk, but all the other boys in school seem to like him.
The narrator of Tom Sawyer is omniscient. Every subsequent work featuring Tom and Huck is narrated by Huck, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which opens with this warning by the author: "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."
Then the story opens, with Huck saying, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly."
In this 2nd novel, Huck is now 13 (as is Tom), and runs away from his abusive father, and rides a raft down the river, landing on an island where he finds Jim, a runaway slave. Huck has been told that helping a runaway slave means going to Hell, but when it looks like Jim will be captured, Huck says, "All right, then, I'll go to Hell," and rescues Jim.
They are found by Tom's relatives, and Tom tells them that Jim's owner has died and freed him in her will, and that Huck's father has also died, so Huck is "free" as well. Tom's relatives offer to adopt Huck, but he runs away, saying he's going to "light out for the Indian Territory," present-day Oklahoma.
Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most beloved American novels. Ernest Hemingway declared that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." T. S. Eliot, Twain's fellow Missourian, called it a "masterpiece."
But it also remains one of the most controversial. Liberals criticize it for Twain's use of local speech, including racial slurs. Conservatives criticize it for being anti-racism.
Less-remembered are 2 more sequels, both narrated by Huck. In 1894, Twain published Tom Sawyer Abroad, a parody of Jules Verne's "scientific novels," with Tom and Huck traveling to Africa in a hot air balloon, and having adventures in Egypt and the jungle. In 1896, Twain published Tom Sawyer, Detective, in which Tom, now a teenager, solves a murder.
Twain became America's leading lecture-circuit figure, unafraid to mock the high and the mighty and point out that their foibles were much the same as those of the low and the powerless. As has been said of journalists since, he sought to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut. (The house burned down in 1923, and a replica was built on the site.) It was the day after Halley's Comet had made its closest approach to Earth. A year before, knowing the comet was coming, Twain predicted that, just as he came in with it, he would go out with it. He was right.
He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. So were Hal Roach, producer of the Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang films; and Ernie Davis, the 1st black Heisman Trophy winner.
In 1985, William Hauptman and country singer Roger Miller wrote a musical titled Big River, based on Huck's novel, and it won Tony Awards. Many later movies and TV shows were based on imagined later adventures of Tom and Huck, but still depict them as boys, as teenagers at the oldest. Few have dared to show what they were like as grown men.
In 1983, Greg Matthews published a novel, The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck and Jim "light out for the territory," but go well past Oklahoma, participating in the California Gold Rush of 1849. So, in this one, Huck is still just a kid.
In 1968, Robert Coover published a novel about a man who created, and becomes obsessed with, a version of what would now be called "fantasy baseball": The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. In 2017, Coover published Huck Out West, imagining Huck's adventures during the Civil War, when he and Tom would have been in their late 20s.
The 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen cast Shane West as a now-grown Tom, a U.S. Secret Service agent. The character was not in the original graphic novel. But West was 25 years old at the time. Since the story takes place in 1899, Tom, had he lived to that point, was more likely to have been at least twice that old.
The 2015 film Band of Robbers puts the characters in the present day, as young adults, with the trope of two boys in trouble, one got caught and went to jail (Huck), and the other got away and cleaned up his act (Tom). But when Huck is released, it turns out Tom, now a cop, still has dreams of being a Robin Hood type, stealing from criminals and giving back the stole property.
In 1981, Bernard Sabath wrote a play, The Boys in Autumn. It's set in the 1920s, and after a long life away, Tom returns to Hannibal. Tom became a vaudeville performer, and Huck, to the much greater surprise, became a respectable gentleman, now a grumpy old man. Frank Rich, then the Broadway columnist for The New York Times, ripped the original production, starring John Cullum (later Holling on Northern Exposure) as Tom and George C. Scott as Huck, angry that Sabath had "given the men lurid secrets that reduce two of the most beloved characters in our cultural heritage to extras in a Harold Robbins novel."
As if that wasn't just the kind of thing that Twain himself wouldn't have applauded! After all, on August 31, 1884, as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was heading for the printing press, Twain wrote a letter to fellow novelist William Dean Howells, saying, "Isn't human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented?"
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December 10, 1884 was a Wednesday. Baseball and football season were over. Hockey was barely organized. And basketball hadn't even been invented. So there were no scores on this historic day.
