who is the character huck finn based on
Huckleberry Finn 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.[1] 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. Twain's friend Tom Blankenship 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 lacking a mother who seems to have died when he was young, this Tom was indeed "at liberty" most of the time.[citation needed]