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.
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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It is never mentioned that as a group they are among the oldest Americans.
ReplyDeleteHaving initially arrived in 1619...that is a very true statement
ReplyDeletewhich 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.