SOURCE: Dawson, Hugh J. “The Ethnicity of Huck Finn—and the Difference It Makes.” American Literary Realism: 1870-1910 30, no. 2 (winter 1998): 1-16.

In the following essay, Dawson explores the Irish-American heritage of Huck and the ways it affects his relationship with Jim.

In an article describing the source and significance of Huckleberry Finn's surname, James L. Colwell has proposed that Mark Twain chose his character's “joyously and unmistakably Celtic” family name very purposefully.” From the ancient Finn McCool to Finnegans Wake, it is a name that rings through Irish legend and literature.¹ (Its cognate appears in the name of the “Fenians,” the legendary Irish warriors under Finn McCool and others in the second and third centuries a.d., that was adopted by the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish-Americans who in the years immediately following the Civil War pledged themselves to aiding the revolutionary overthrow of the English government...