Mark Twain Says He Did Not Invent Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Most people assume that novelists invent and construct their characters through conscious, creative imagination. And they probably do invent some characters that way. But their major, most successful characters are said by novelists themselves to come to them mysteriously (Toni Morrison) or from memories of people they have known or read about (Mark Twain). 

In the post of October 26, 2013, “Toni Morrison and the Novelist’s Characters,” she was quoted as saying, in the context of discussing one of her major characters, “…many characters [come to me] rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including [their] name.”

In an interview conducted by Lucius (Lute) Pease, published in the Portland Oregonian of 11 August 1895, Mark Twain said:

“Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both real characters, but Tom Sawyer was not the real name of the former…Finn was the real name of the other boy, but I tacked on the Huckleberry…The characters were no creation of my own…

“I don’t believe an author, good, bad or indifferent, ever lived, who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection of someone he had known…even when he is making no attempt to draw his character from life, when he is striving to create something different, even then, however ideal his drawing, he is yet unconsciously drawing from memory…

“In attempting to represent some character which he cannot recall, which he draws from what he thinks is his imagination, an author may often fall into the error of copying in part a character already drawn by another, a character which impressed itself upon his memory from some book. So he has made a picture of a picture with all his pains. We mortals can’t create, we can only copy. Some copies are good and some are bad.”

Scholarship may or may not support the idea that Twain copied Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from life. The point here is that Twain did not subjectively experience his characters as having been invented by him, which is also true with Toni Morrison (see above), and which was also true with Dickens (June 2013 post).

The new character probably is, directly or indirectly, based on one or more real people or characters in books. But the theory of this blog is that the writer’s mind has taken those elements and molded them into an alternate personality with a mind of its own. And it is the latter that the novelist works with in writing the novel.