Dan Walker answers the questions Mark Twain avoided: What if Huck really carries out his promise, at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to "light out for the Territory" and is caught up, as he surely would be, in the national crises of Manifest Destiny and the Civil War? Twain himself got sixty-two pages into his own sequel and quit. Why? Was he bored? Or was he afraid of the implications? Would the choices of a real maturity--of love and war--be harder to finesse than those of childhood? What if Huck, Tom, Becky, and the rest had to make the kind of hard choices many Americans had to make when history called? For the Boy who once said "All right, then, I'll go to Hell"-what might that mean in the Valley of Mexico, parted from the love of his life, apparently forever, or behind Rebel lines in the Wilderness of central Virginia, with the duty to kill or capture old friends on the other side? How would our ageless hero do in such trials? Hell might be preferable. This revised Second Edition includes the originally intended "Epilogue," which was left out of the first edition, now out of print. Walker's own work experience--which includes ten years as a historian at Fredericksburg- Spotsylvania National Military Park and many years teaching English and creative writing--has prepared him particularly well to weave such a tale.
About the Author: Dan Walker is the author of Huckleberry Finn in Love and War: The Lost Journals, the Iron John Trilogy, of Teaching English on the Block (Eye on Education, 2000) and of numerous poems. He taught English for 13 years at the Commonwealth Governor's School's Riverbend High School site and serves as an occasional consultant for the school. He has taught English and creative writing in Spotsylvania County for thirty-nine years and courses in professional education at the University of Mary Washington. and in the Virginia Community College's Career-Switcher program. He worked for ten seasons as a ranger-historian at Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania National Military Park, and for twelve years before that at Shenandoah National Park. He has been married for forty years to his wife Mary and currently lives with her on a small farm with ten cats, three dogs, two horses, two chickens, and one pear tree-with, so far, no partridges in it.