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- Title
Blood on the Hills: The Hatfields and McCoys and Feuding Families in Huckleberry Finn.
- Authors
Long, Jordana Ashman
- Abstract
In the spring of 1880, two events occurred whose synchronicity of detail suggests a more than coincidental connection. Mark Twain wrote chapters seventeen and eighteen of his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, describing Huck's encounter with a family feud along the Mississippi, and his departure from that place after the elopement of two children from the rival families precipitates a devastating battle between their relatives. In the hills of West Virginia, Roseanna McCoy met Johnse Hatfield. She left her family to live with him, even though the bitter enmity between their families had already led to bloodshed and would lead to far more before the decade was out. Yet, despite the readiness of contemporary material to inspire his feud story, Twain chose to credit it to a different real-life incident which occurred some twenty years earlier, and to which he himself was, in his own words, "near being an eye-witness." However, this particular feud, the Darnell (or Darnall)-Watson conflict, has little in common factually with either the Huckleberry Finn episode or Twain's earlier version of the story, which appeared in Life on the Mississippi. Though Twain never mentions the Hatfields and McCoys, his feud story in Huckleberry Finn follows their history in many large and small details, especially the "history" presented by the semi-legendary versions published in newspapers. This correlation suggests a direct connection between the two stories, a connection that cannot be proven but provides much useful food for thought in approaching the interpretation and teaching of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- Subjects
LITERARY quarrels; TWAIN, Mark, 1835-1910; ADVENTURES of Huckleberry Finn, The (Book : Twain); HATFIELDS &; the McCoys, The (Book); LIFE on the Mississippi (Book)
- Publication
Teaching American Literature, 2014, Vol 7, Issue 1/2, p29
- ISSN
2150-3974
- Publication type
Article