The Real Huck and the Real Becky

The characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were not invented from nothing. Twain drew them from real people he knew in Hannibal. Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer's schoolyard love, was based on a girl named Laura Hawkins who lived directly across the street from the Clemens family.

She was close to Samuel in age, and the two were childhood friends. Laura Hawkins later married a doctor named James Frazer and spent most of her life in the Hannibal area, long outliving Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn had a more complicated original.

Twain said directly that Huck was based on a real boy named Tom Blankenship, whose house stood just a few doors from the Clemens home. Blankenship's father was known as a drunkard, the family lived in poverty, and respectable parents in Hannibal warned their children away from him. That prohibition, naturally, made him irresistible.

Twain later wrote that Blankenship was ignorant, unwashed, and insufficiently fed, but that he had as good a heart as any boy he had ever known. The real Huck Finn was a child who lived on the literal margins of a respectable Missouri town, answering to no one, which is exactly what Twain made him in the fiction. The house where the Clemens family lived and the house where Laura Hawkins grew up still stand on Hill Street, a few steps apart, in the middle of the historic district.