Mark Twain and the Lost Manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain and the Lost Manuscript of Huckleberry Finn

On November 30, 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the town

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)....

... middle of paper ...

... 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