Mark Twain and the Lost Manuscript of Huckleberry Finn
On November 30, 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the town
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of Florida, Missouri. He had four siblings, three were older than him and
one was younger. When Clemens was four, his family moved to the town of
Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal was a town located on the Mississippi river
and would later become the setting for most of his stories (“Twain”). In
1847, when Clemens was twelve his father died. Clemens grew up in an
educated family (Works of Twain: Biographical Sketch). At age twelve he
was apprenticed to a printer and at age sixteen he worked under his brother,
Orion who was a newspaper publisher in Hannibal. Clemens made an early
attempt at writing by sending comical travel letters to the Keokuk Saturday
Post in Iowa under the pen name Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. These letters
contained purposely inserted errors typical of Clemen’s later work. When he
was twenty-two he fulfilled a childhood dream by becoming apprenticed to a
riverboat pilot named, Horace Bixby. After his apprenticeship, he worked
as a river boat pilot for four years.
The Civil War stopped riverboat
traffic in 1861. Clemens was out of work for several weeks before he
traveled with his brother Orion to Nevada. Orion had aspirations of
becoming Territorial Secretary of Nevada. Clemens became a reporter and
later a feature editor for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, a
Nevada newspaper. During his reporting of the Nevada Constitutional
Convention, Samuel Langhorne Clemens officially adopted for himself the pen
name “Mark Twain” (Works of Twain: Brief Account)….
… Simon and
Schuster, Inc., 1990.
Outline
Thesis Statement: An original draft of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn exists containing material excluded from the first
printing of the book.
I. Twain’s biographical information
A. Childhood
B. Education
C. Professional life
1. Jobs
2. Literary works
3. Financial conditions
D. Personal life
1. Life style
2. Family life II. Original manuscript of The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn
A. General information
1. Discovery information
2. How the manuscript was lost
B. Legal battle for printing rights
C. Difference from the first publishing III. Conclusion
