Huckleberry Finn Through The Looking Glass

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The image below is the back cover of
Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN,
as seen through the looking glass.

Please do not be alarmed by my hollow eye
but note where my finger is pointing.

Robert G. O'Meally, who wrote the introduction, 
is Zora Neale Professor of Literature
at Columbia University.

The introduction is eminently quotable and warrants an apology to Professor O'Meally.

Below the photograph, you will read only the words of Ralph Ellison.
He is the author of  Invisible Man, a resoundingly important novel
published in 1952.

However, the quote is from one of Mr. Ellison's essays.
It prefaces Professor O'Meally's introduction
to Huckleberry Finn.

Without the presence of blacks, [Huckleberry Finn] could not have been written.
No Huck and Jim. No American novel as we know it.

For not only is the black man a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain
raised to literary eloquence, but Jim's condition as American and Huck's 
commitment to freedom are at the moral center of the novel.

–Ralph Ellison, "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks," in
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

The next Mark Twain page is here. 
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