Missing Twain Manuscript Is Believed Found

A century-old, handwritten manuscript purported to be a portion of the original text of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” has been found in a trunk in the attic of a 62-year-old librarian’s home in Hollywood.

The 600-page manuscript is in the hands of the auction firm Sotheby’s of New York, according to a Sotheby’s spokeswoman in Beverly Hills who declined to release details, including who authenticated the document, pending an announcement today. Sotheby’s has told Twain scholars in California and elsewhere that it is convinced that the manuscript is genuine.

Two Twain scholars in California who have been consulted on the manuscript but who have not examined it themselves believe it to be a section of the book that mysteriously disappeared in the late 19th Century.

“There is no question in my mind what it is,” said one California-based expert who has studied Twain’s letters, notebooks and manuscripts for two decades and who was given a detailed description of the find.

“This is the most important manuscript the man ever wrote,” he added.

Another Twain scholar, John Seelye of the University of Florida, said he had not yet heard of the find, but speculated that it would be difficult to fake such a document because of the large volume of Twain handwriting samples that are available.

According to the Hollywood woman, the manuscript has rested for nearly 30 years in one of six trunks containing the papers of her grandfather, a Buffalo, N.Y., lawyer known to have corresponded with Mark Twain, which was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The woman has been methodically searching through them since they arrived. When she realized what she had found, she said, “I couldn’t believe it; I just could not believe it.”

News of the manuscript has circulated among some Twain scholars. Discovery of the text, roughly the first half of the book and written in Twain’s own hand, would be a landmark event for students of “Huckleberry Finn,” which is widely considered to be the seminal novel in American literature.

Without the original manuscript, scholars have had to speculate about whether the printed book contained all of Twain’s own words or whether changes had been introduced by an editor or printer.

“It would certainly be the greatest literary discovery of the 20th Century,” said William H. Loos, rare-book curator at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, which houses one of the nation’s largest Twain collections.

The Buffalo library may have a claim to ownership of the manuscript, and it was not clear late Tuesday whether Sotheby’s planned to auction the volume or had other plans for it. Loos said he had not seen the manuscript but had been told by Sotheby’s that it was authentic.

The librarian who retrieved the manuscript from her attic is the granddaughter of James Fraser Gluck of Buffalo, who corresponded with Twain over a period of years in the late 1880s.

Gluck wrote Twain in 1885 to request that the author donate some of his original manuscripts to the Buffalo library. Twain obliged, sending the second half of the “Huckleberry Finn” manuscript.

At the time, Twain wrote Gluck that the first portion, which he had written in longhand, apparently had been destroyed at the printers.

“The first half was copied by the pen, and when the book was finally finished, the original of that half probably went to the printers and was destroyed,” Twain wrote to Gluck.

“Half of the Finn book (the second half) is extant because that half was written after the typewriter came into general use. Before that, it was my custom (and everybody’s in my line, no doubt), to have my books copied with a pen and ship the original to the printers, who never returned it.”

Twain was apparently mistaken and is believed to have later found the first portion of the manuscript and to have sent it to the Buffalo library. In a letter dated 1887, Gluck and another library official confirmed receipt of the first portion of the manuscript, according to scholars.

Other than that letter, however, there seemed to be no trace of the first half of the manuscript--until now.

Gluck’s granddaughter, a Hollywood librarian who spoke on condition that her name not be published, said that in 1961 she inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to Gluck and his wife.

Ever since, the trunks had been stored in the attic of her Hollywood home, as she slowly, sifted through the contents.

“It took a while to go through it,” she said in an interview. “I have four children, a full-time job. . . . I went very slowly. That’s the way life is sometimes.”

The trunks mostly contained her grandfather’s letters and her grandmother’s poems, she said. Then, last fall, she came upon the handwritten manuscript.

Scarcely believing what she saw, she carefully examined the cursive script. She compared Twain’s signature and other handwriting with samples at the library where she works. She became convinced it was the real thing.

The woman called her sister, then they called Sotheby’s. She faxed a couple of photocopied pages to the Sotheby’s office in New York; they then dispatched an executive from the Beverly Hills office to the woman’s home to pick up the document. An armored truck transported it to the airport to be dispatched to New York, she said.

“It just looks like a manuscript,” she said. “Its pages are pretty old” but the black ink is legible.

“We were very excited to receive such a find,” said Christa Henricks, a spokeswoman for the Beverly Hills office of Sotheby’s. “It was a big hoopla.”

Twain wrote the first half of “Huckleberry Finn” between 1876 and 1880.

“Huckleberry Finn,” published in 1884, is probably Twain’s masterpiece. A picaresque tale, it narrates the story of young Huck and his companion, Jim, a runaway slave, as the two travel down the Mississippi River on a makeshift raft.

The manuscript, if ultimately proved to be genuine, opens the door to scholars and fans who will pore over the work in search of new details about Twain--any word usages that appear different or any notes that might appear in margins.

If the manuscript is auctioned, it could fetch as much as $1.5 million, in Loos’ opinion. He and others expressed fear, however, that if the document goes to auction, it might be taken out of the country and out of the reach of scholars.

“It is quite unique and quite rare,” said the California expert. “It would bring collectors out of the woodwork.”

But, he added, placing a dollar figure on its worth is impossible.

“It breaks all the forms. You don’t really have a measuring stick to go by.”