Welcome to the Witness Podcast with me Rachel Gilman. History is told by the people who were there.

Today I'm taking you back to February in 1990 and the moment half of the original manuscript of one of America's best love books, The Adventures of Huckleberryry Finn tells the story of the young white Huck Finn and his

black friend Jim and the things they got up to on the Mississippi River.

The American novelist Ernest Hemingway proclaimed that it's the best American novel ever written,

that nothing will ever be written like it, and that all American literature came from that book.

The novel, while mildly controversial when it was first published,

has become increasingly controversial.

Controversial because the racial stereotypes and language used in the book seem shocking to a modern audience.

But at the time it was published, it was seen as vulgar and challenging to social norms.

Tom Riggsad is a professor of English at Buffalo University, a town in New York State where Mark Twain lived for a short time.

My first job out of college was at the Buffalo Cur Express, a thriving Buffalo newspaper, a daily newspaper that Twain had worked

four years earlier and I started reading some of Twain's original writings on microfilm in the library of the newspaper and started poking around in research papers on Twain's connection to Buffalo.

And in 1979 I wrote a feature story where I researched the handwritten manuscript of Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn that was housed in the Buffalo Library. The only known part of that handwritten manuscript

to that date was the second half of the novel.

So I investigated that story.

It seemed like a good story, how did the Buffalo Library come to acquire that existing piece of the handwritten manuscript?

Tom found out that the manuscript had been donated to the library in the late 19th

century by a buffalo lawyer called James Gluck. His granddaughter is Pam Lind home.

Tom Riggsad got to know Pam in the course of his research. My grandfather started, or he was one of the people that started,

the Buffalo Young Men's Association.

And that's what they did.

...