Illustrating Jim in 1962

COVER: MACMILLAN CLASSICS EDITION, 1962

  The Macmillan Classics, according to their own advertising, "offer children, teen-agers, and parents a distinguished home library of fine reading." The ad at the end of the third printing of Huck Finn (1966) lists 40 titles in the series. MT and Louisa May Alcott are the only authors with two books on the list; as you'd expect, the other MT title is Tom Sawyer, which like Huck Finn was illustrated by John Falter. Falter is best known for the many covers he created for The Saturday Evening Post. For the novel he created the cover at left, and 15 full-page black-and-white illustrations. Each drawing is accompanied by a passage from the novel, printed as a kind of caption in italics at the bottom of the facing page. You can see the five that include Jim along with their captions by clicking on the images below. Falter's representation of the moment when Huck and Jim first get together on Jackson's Island evokes the famous scene on another island when Robinson Crusoe tells "Friday" his name; Defoe's novel is on the Macmillan Classics list, though a different artist illustrated it. It's also worth noting that Falter did not illustrate the hairball scene that most other illustrators have been so attracted to, and that Jim does not appear in either of the two illustrations Falter did for the novel's Evasion section.


The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, Illustrated by John Falter; Afterword by Clifton Fadiman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962. Courtesy the University of Tennessee Knoxville Library.



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