the adventures of huckleberry finn book cover

For all of its flaws, it makes an admirable attempt to identify with and faithfully render the plight of enslaved people. Everybody drinks water.”) Huck Finn on the other hand is a serious adult novel with serious adult themes. (Twain himself would say, “my books are water: those of the great geniuses are wine. As the Mark Twain House puts it, “some critics have dismissed work as lightweight, blithely ignoring the important statements they made on race.” Tom Sawyer is a lightweight book, the work of Twain the popular humorist. The differences between the two books (so hilariously contrasted by Louis CK), could stand for the two sides of both Twain and Rockwell. Above, see three of Rockwell’s illustrations from Tom Sawyer and, below, one from his Huck Finn. In part, this is because Rockwell illustrated for Heritage Press two of Twain’s most famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1936 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1940.

Though separated by a generation, the two, writes the Mark Twain House & Museum’s website, are “twinned in many ways in the public consciousness.” In a way, these two sides of America’s most popular illustrator mirror those of the nation’s most popular writer, Mark Twain. But we might think of Rockwell as working on two registers throughout his career-as the PG-rated painter of mischievous, childish niceness, and the earnest commentator on mores and values in adult society. The sixties Rockwell, though still very much a purveyor of small town Americana, became a somewhat weightier figure, even if he never gained (or sought) acceptance in the art world. Instead of pale, freckle-faced scamps and neighborly civil servants, Rockwell painted likenesses of world leaders like Nehru and Nasser, as well as a now iconic symbol of the Civil Rights struggle on a 1964 Look magazine cover. And while an artist like Rockwell-so steeped in nostalgia, so lacking in irony and a taste for transgression-might have faded into complete irrelevance amidst the tumult of the sixties, the opposite in fact occurred. There’s also no getting around the fact that his career helped define the way mainstream Americans saw themselves for decades. There’s no getting around it: Norman Rockwell was a square.

The adventures of huckleberry finn book cover