Huckleberry Finn - Inspiration

Inspiration

The character of Huck Finn is based on Tom Blankenship, the real-life son of a sawmill laborer and sometime drunkard named Woodson Blankenship, who lived in a "ramshackle" house near the Mississippi River behind the house where the author grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. The father of Huck, called "Pap" Finn, may be based on Jimmy Finn, a full-blown alcoholic who lived on the streets, and it is only through Twain's remembrances that Woodson is characterized as a drunkard. Twain left Hannibal and his boyhood at an early age and his memories of these people are colored by what he could have known and understood at the time, as a boy of less than 14 years old. Tom didn't attend school because there were no public schools at the time, and his family was too poor to send him to a private school. Left at loose ends in a busy household with six sisters and a mother who seems to have died when he was young, Tom was indeed "at liberty" most of the time.

Twain mentions his childhood friend Tom Blankenship as the inspiration for creating Huckleberry Finn in his autobiography: "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any other boy's." – Mark Twain's Autobiography.

Huck's adventure is in part based on an incident that happened to Tom Blankenship's eldest sibling, his brother Benson, a teenage fisherman who had his own skiff. He aided a runaway slave in defiance of the law, spurning a probable reward to instead bring food and other items to the slave, who was hiding in the wilderness near the river over the course of a summer. Eventually, bounty hunters chased the slave onto a logjam, where he drowned. Days later, Clemens and other local boys were exploring the logjam, when the body was dislodged and sprang up from beneath the water violently, frightening the boys. Some critics have also connected certain traits of Benson Blankenship to the character Muff Potter, from Twain's novel Tom Sawyer, such as his owning a skiff and occasionally sharing his catch with the boys of the town, and mending their kites.

Tom Blankenship has passed from history with few solid clues as to his ultimate fate. His sister told Twain near the turn of the century that both of her brothers were dead, and local rumor says that Tom perished in one of the cholera epidemics which swept up the Mississippi River in the years after the Civil War. Twain himself told reporters that he heard that Tom moved to Montana and was a well-respected Justice of the Peace, but this is thought to be wishful thinking by some historians. A Hannibal, Mo., old timer related that Tom "left Hannibal for the penitentiary." Mention is made in the local newspapers that he was arrested for stealing food repeatedly in the early 1860s.

No death certificate has ever been located for Tom, but census records indicate that Benson moved to Texas and started a family alongside his uncles and cousins by the 1860s. This suggests that there may have been a period when Tom and his father Woodson were more or less alone in Hannibal, as the daughters all married or entered into service with local families. No record of Tom's serving in the military during the Civil War has emerged as of this date, either. A local was quoted as saying the family "played out" and disappeared from the area by the time the war was over. The ultimate truth seems to have passed into the unknowable realm, leaving us only with Twain's fiction.