The Daily Bulletin Archive

Thomas Reigstad, professor emeritus of English, was interviewed by Rachael Gillman, host of the BBC series Witness, for the episode “The Lost Manuscript of Huckleberry Finn,” which aired on February 20. Witness is a production of the BBC World Service that examines key events in history through firsthand accounts and expert commentary. Reigstad, a Mark Twain scholar, talked about the discovery of the missing half of Twain’s original manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Presumed lost for almost 100 years, the extant half of the manuscript was found in 1990 in a steamer trunk in Hollywood, California, and underwent months of legal wrangling before eventually being reunited with its original half in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.