UP THE RIVER

Capturing Mark Twain.

- LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON

America sees itself in a young boy who learns—but not too much—and whose story ends with his eyes on an open horizon, a stretch of land claimed by the nation but not yet bound to it. That's where, in the collective imagination, he remains. Even his creator believed that following the boy into adulthood would ruin the image. And yet he once imagined doing just that, laying Huckleberry Finn to rest alongside his companion:

Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—& crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, & scans always every face for Tom & Becky &c. Tom comes, at last, 60 from wandering the world & tends Huck, & together they talk the old times; both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mould. They die together.

At once a salesman and a satirist, Twain mocked the myths he helped create, and became the most enduring one of all.

Mark Twain scribbled this fragment in a journal around 1891, just a few years shy of sixty himself. The contemplated sequel was never written. But much of what Twain did publish around this time became the most enduring one of all.

At once a salesman and a satirist, Twain mocked the myths he helped create, and became the most enduring one of all. is no less dispiriting. “I have started Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator,” he told a publisher, saying he'd written twelve thousand words and promising “additional parts without delay” if “numbers” proved favorable. The work, “Tom Sawyer Abroad” (1894), begins, “Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? ... No, he wasn't. It only just p'isoned him for more.”