Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100
Essay for the New York Times Book Review, 9 December 1984, marking the centenary of Mark Twain's novel. Mailer's only extended treatment of nineteenth-century American literature and, by Lennon's estimate, one of his finest literary essays.
“Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100,” Mailer’s essay for the New York Times Book Review, appeared on 9 December 1984 (1, 36–37), marking the centenary of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Lennon calls it “Mailer’s only extended comment on nineteenth-century American literature, and one of his finest literary essays” — Mailer reading Twain’s novel as a working novelist rather than a scholar, and locating in it the headwaters of the American vernacular voice he had claimed for his own Tough Guys Don’t Dance the same year as a book “written in an entirely American idiom” (84.2).
The essay was widely reprinted: in the Chicago Tribune Magazine on 27 January 1985 (85.12), and later in The Time of Our Time (98.7) and Mind of an Outlaw.