The schoolboy memories that inspired Mark Twain's much-loved children's characters Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are revealed for the first time today, 100 years after the author's death, in an extract from his forthcoming autobiography.
Published later this week in Granta magazine, the extract finds Twain – who insisted that his memoirs remain unpublished until a century after his death so that he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent" – reminiscing about the time he spent on his uncle's farm as a child. He met the middle-aged slave "Uncle Dan'l" there, "whose head was the best one in the negro quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile" – and who went on to become Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
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