When the first batch of drawings came in to Webster & Co, MT was unhappy with them. It's not clear exactly why MT was attracted to Kemble's style. Kemble's autobiographical essay called "ILLUSTRATING HUCKLEBERRY FINN" published in Colophon in 1930, says a lot, more than Kemble himself could realize, about how and why his pictures appealed to contemporary preconceptions. In 1929 Kemble wrote that his work on Huck was the first time he had done "Negro drawings" however, as he says in the same essay, by 1884 the caricatures of African Americans that he drew to accompany "The Thompson Street Poker Club," a regular feature in Life magazine, were already well known. He himself selected Kemble to illustrate it, based on Kemble's work for the humor magazine Life. To see which ones were used, and which were left out, CLICK HERE.Īs the owner of the company that was publishing Huck Finn, MT had almost complete control over its production. prepared what they called a "Cheap Edition" of Huck Finn, which re-used 44 of Kemble's illustrations. From there you can also see 65 of them as they looked on the pages of the first edition, the 65 that MT and Charles Webster, MT's agent at Webster & Company, chose to include in the sales prospectus for the novel. All of Kemble's illustrations can be seen by going to the GALLERY OF HUCK ILLUSTRATIONS, where they are listed by their captions. Kemble, a young New York artist whose career as an illustrator and cartoonist was given a tremendous lift by the commission. The original edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contained 174 illustrations, by Edward W.
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