Blew Burd

by Windsor Kemble, Edward (1861-1933)

$250 · Offered by Biblio

First edition

19th Century. Color lithograph. 7 x 10 inches. Framed but unglazed. (January 18, 1861 – September 19, 1933) was an American illustrator. He is known best for illustrating the first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and for his cartoons of African Americans. Edward Windsor Kemble was a young illustrator for a New York humor magazine called Life in 1884 when Mark Twain hired him to do the illustrations for Huck Finn. His drawings of Jim, as he himself put in a 1930 essay on "Illustrating Huckleberry Finn," "started something in [his] artistic career." Magazine editors, southern writers and the American reading public were so pleased with Kemble's representation of African American characters that by the time Houghton Mifflin recruited him to illustrate their 1892 two-volume edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin he was a specialist in what he called "negro drawings." Because of Kemble's association with the works of authors like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page -- the post-Reconstruction Southern writers who sought to revise Stowe's account of the ante bellum South -- the decision to use his version of slaves is an indication of how, by the 1890s, the distance between Stowe's attack on slavery and nostalgic apologies for it had narrowed.

• Publisher: 19th Century
• Edition: First Edition
• Binding: unknown

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