Mark Twain Manuscript Exhibit at Karpeles Museum

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Thursday, May 2 – Sunday, September 1, 2013
Karpeles Museum, 94 Broadway, Newburgh

Probably the most admired and beloved author in American history, the man writing as Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Called by critic H. L. Mencken “the true father of American literature, the first genuinely great American artist of the royal blood,” Mark Twain established a towering reputation with such novels as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

The Karpeles Museum is proud to present examples of writing in the master’s hand, including a personal letter in which the author acknowledges a detail of Tom Sawyer that he neglected to incorporate in the original manuscript, and a page from the original manuscript of his dramatization of that novel, with his own comments at the bottom. Other original manuscript material includes a letter discussing his plans to dramatize The Prince and the Pauper and one in which he comments on an illustration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. A page from the manuscript of The Gilded Age, a popular satire co-authored by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873), recounts how Samuel Clemens came up with the pseudonym Mark Twain.

Illustrations of Mark Twain’s work have also become classics. Included in the exhibition are an original picture of Huckleberry Finn by the noted 19th-century artist E. W. Kemble from the first edition of the novel (1884), and a pencil drawing of Tom Sawyer by Normal Rockwell published in the Saturday Evening Post.

– press release by Dennis Wepman
– photo © Library of Congress