Word: huck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, edited by Charles Neider. The latest edition of Sam Clemens' massive, sprawling recollections gives a fascinating picture of the writer whom T. S. Eliot characterized thus: "The adult side of him was boyish. Only the boy in him, that was Huck Finn, was adult...
...thus seems strange that Holbrook finds it necessary to summarize or abbreviate some of Twain's best tales, for example the episode of Huck Finn and the runaway slave Jim on a Mississippi raft. Some local men, searching for escaped slaves, ask Huck if his companion is "white or black." Huck invokes the old tall-tale weapon, and convinces the men that his companion is his smallpox-afflicted "pop." The tale takes on fantastic proportions, but the authorities take in every word and even give Huck two $20 gold pieces before fleeing the pestilence...
Holbrook adequately portrays the paradoxical and inverted morality that makes Huck conscience-striken over his assistance to a runaway; but he unfortunately omits the central yarn, which provides humor and reveals a distinctive Twain touch...
Having acted the angry descendant of slaves, the chained workman, the devout penitent, the impish lover, Belafonte always returns to being the small boy, performing a shuffling dance between verses, a sort of dark-skinned Huck Finn. At least once during each show he slouches comfortably about the floor directing irrelevant patter at waiters, musicians and ringside patrons ("Don't pay, comrades! Let's make a rush for the door!"). He often finishes by kidding his audience into joining him in a few choruses of Matilda: "Big Spenders be still! Now the intellectuals! EVERYBODY...
...Writers. "They have small chins and big heads and cannot win an argument." The few writers he knew who have fought back, Hecht remembered warmly. His favorite rebel: Charles (Fearless Pagan) Lederer, who came to work looking like a "decadent Huck Finn" and was in love with "the most highly paid musical comedy star in New York [Marilyn Miller]." One day she took him to lunch, read him the riot act about rising at a respectable hour and taking daily baths. "When she got done, Charlie handed her his trousers, which he had taken off during the conversation and said...