Meet The American Who Served As The Model For Huck Finn, 'Kindly Young Heathen' Tom Blankenship

Kerry J. Byrne at Fox News offers a piece on the man who inspired Mark Twain and was the model for the great American character Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn. 

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" enjoys acclaim as the "Great American Novel," its title character a uniquely beloved figure in our national heritage.

Author Mark Twain's riverfront Missouri boy was poor in manners and material wealth, but rich in spirit and charisma. 

Huckleberry Finn "is part of the tapestry of not just American culture but American education," said Matthew Seybold, scholar-in-residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies (www.marktwainstudies.com) at Elmira College in Elmira, New York. He also told Fox News Digital in an interview, "It is inescapably and irrepressibly American in all its beauty and horror."

Huck Finn, however, was more than just a fictional figure forged from the imagination of a great writer and wit. Huckleberry was a real-life, hardscrabble, all-American boy. 

His name was Tom Blankenship.  

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Meet the American who served as the model for Huck Finn, 'kindly young heathen' Tom Blankenship | Fox News