Quote-unQuote

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The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes = G. CARLIN...Stain glass, engraved glass, frosted glass
–give me plain glass = JOHN FOWLES...Music is the mathematics of the gods = PYTHAGORAS...Nothing is more fluid than language = R. L. SWIHART
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>I think therefore I am troubled = RENEE DESCARTES<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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Thursday, March 27, 2014

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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2 comments:

  1. It is never mentioned that as a group they are among the oldest Americans.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Having initially arrived in 1619...that is a very true statement
    which may explain why–as a "group"–they are among
    the most talented Americans.

    More true of the past than the present, a lot of their visible talent
    has remained invisible.

    For example, though it may be impossible to prove,
    I believe the Greatest Cookbook never published
    involved the peanut, written by an Alabama scientist
    named George Washington Carver.

    Had his name been George Washington REESE,
    he might have partitioned the book into pieces.

    ReplyDelete