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 Mark Twain and the Lost Manuscript of The Adventures 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 repo...
