The Inspiration for Huckleberry Finn

Twain: Huckleberry Finn

In this course Professor Mark Seybold (Elmira College) explores Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In the first lecture, we think about what inspired Twain to write Huckleberry, focusing in particular on the speech made by Frederick Douglass in Elmira, NY in August 1880. After that, in the second lecture, we think about Twain’s experience in the American Civil War and its impact on his writing of Huckleberry Finn. In the third lecture, we think about Huckleberry Finn as a novel which epitomises the aesthetic movement of American Realism, particularly in the figure of its first-person narrator, Huckleberry Finn himself, before turning in the fourth lecture to consider Huckleberry Finn as a critique of American Romanticism. In the fifth lecture, we think about the controversial ending of the novel, before turning in the sixth and final lecture to consider the novel’s long and enduring afterlife in American culture.

The Inspiration for Huckleberry Finn

In this lecture we think what inspired Mark Twain to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, focusing in particular on: (i) Twain’s previous novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), in which Huckleberry Finn appears as a character; (ii) Frederick Douglass’ speech at Elmira, NY in August 1880, in which he described the condition of formerly enslaved African-Americans in the American South (‘in a condition but little above that in which they were found before the rebellion’); and (iii) Twain’s return to the American South in 1881, and what he saw there.