E. W. Kemble illustrated the first edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kemble was a young American artist and cartoonist whose work for the humor magazine Life attracted Twain's attention.
Twain personally selected Kemble to create the illustrations for the novel. The first American edition appeared in February 1885, following an earlier publication in the United Kingdom and Canada. Kemble's drawings helped establish the visual identities of Huck Finn, Jim, and the other characters for early readers.
Kemble's work was not simply decorative. His illustrations gave individual personalities to minor figures and helped convey the novel's regional settings, comic situations, and social tensions. Because he had limited access to models, some drawings were based partly on guesswork. He later produced another set of illustrations for editions published in the late 1890s.
Arthur B. Frost and John Tenniel are also famous nineteenth-century illustrators, but they were not responsible for the original illustrations of Huckleberry Finn. True Williams, another Twain illustrator, is more closely associated with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.