Word: huck
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Most exciting for lay readers is the essay on Huck Finn. Characteristically, it never occurred to Mark Twain, when he started Huckleberry Finn, that he was writing something of matchless newness in the world's literary history. He wrote the first half of the book "more to be at work than anything else," laid it by unfinished for six years, then added some of the most magnificent chapters in U.S. literature and a folderol ending. For Mark, says DeVoto, "felt no difference in value between the highest truths of fiction and merely literary burlesque." He had almost no ability...
...Mark Twain's two greatest books-the "authority over the imagination of mankind" which gives them their strong mythical enchantment. Nevertheless, some readers may find it hard to agree that Huckleberry Finn is "as dark a book as Moby Dick" still harder to agree that its bitterest lines-Huck's meditation on slavery-excel the best of Jonathan Swift. But discerning critics will be grateful for DeVoto's evaluation of the heroic role of Jim, for his mapping of the streaks of cruelty and abject, indigenous meanness which are too easily overlooked in the broad morning sunlight...
...Huckins Yacht Corp. yards in Jacksonville, Fla., Huck went to work. He locked himself in his laboratory, neglected his family, cut his friends, put in 100 hours a week over a drawing board. Last July his PT-69, a neat, sleek boat which jumps from wave to wave like a rock skipping over the water, was ready for Navy tests. Last week the Navy showed that it shared some of Huck's confidence that he had built the fastest, smoothest torpedo boat in the world: it gave him a contract (about $1,000,000) to build eight of them...
...Huck started the yacht company in 1928 after selling a family lumber business because he liked boats better. He is the designer; his partner, a close-mouthed Yankee named Henry Skinner Baldwin, is the businessman. Their Fairform Flyers (produced at a profit each year even during the depression) are expensive, carefully engineered boats known as the Duesenbergs of the small motor yacht class...
...dealings with the Navy, Huck was equally brash. When the Navy suggested that he change the location of the PT-69's toilet, he replied that he would then have to run its drain pipe into either the exhaust or the officers' filing cabinet...