Huckleberry Finn

Huck is the son of a vagrant drunkard. He enjoys lazing about and joining Tom Sawyer in adventures. At the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck is adopted by the Widow Douglas in return for saving her life. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in some respects a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the widow attempts to “civilize” the newly rich Huck. Huck is kidnapped by his father but manages to fake his own death and escape to Jackson’s Island, where he coincidentally meets up with Jim, a slave of the Widow Douglas’s sister, Miss Watson. Jim is running for freedom because he has found out that Miss Watson plans to “sell him South” for eight hundred dollars. The two take a raft down the Mississippi River in the hope of finding freedom from slavery for Jim and freedom from his father and controlling foster parent for Huck.

The character of Huck Finn was based on Tom Blankenship, the real-life son of a drunkard who lived in a “ramshackle” house near the Mississippi River behind the house where the author grew up in Hannibal, Missouri.