On [:] An owl | Mark Twain, 1884

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die;”

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884

The first and last pages of Mark Twain’s handwritten manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in America in January 1885, has always been in trouble. According to Ernest Hemingway, it was the “one book” from which “all modern American literature” came, and contemporary critics and scholars have treated it as one of the greatest American works of art.