Character Inspiration
The character may have been modeled after one or more slaves, or on the "shrewd, wise, polite, always good-natured ..." formerly enslaved African-American George Griffin, whom Twain employed as a butler, starting around 1879, and treated as a confidant.
The author, Samuel Clemens, grew up in the presence of his parents' and other Hannibal, Missourians' slaves and listened to their stories; an uncle, too, was a slave owner.
Read more about this topic: Jim (Huckleberry Finn)
Famous quotes containing the words character and/or inspiration:
“If there be no nobility of descent in a nation, all the more indispensable is it that there should be nobility of ascent—a character in them that bear rule, so fine and high and pure, that as men come within the circle of its influence, they involuntarily pay homage to that which is the one pre-eminent distinction, the Royalty of Virtue.”
—Henry Codman Potter (1835–1908)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)