Meet the American who served as the model for Huck Finn, 'kindly young heathen' Tom Blankenship

Fictional icon Huckleberry Finn was inspired by Mark Twain's real-life boyhood pal in Hannibal, Missouri, Tom Blankenship — who was described as a "kindly young heathen."

Blankenship "was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed. But he had as good a heart as ever any boy had." - Mark Twain The Blankenships were "undoubtedly considered ‘White trash' by their neighbors." "Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad."  "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’ …. It’s the best book we’ve had." — Ernest Hemingway Kerry J. Byrne is a lifestyle reporter with Fox News Digital.

Huckleberry Finn "is part of the tapestry of not just American culture but American education," said Matthew Seybold, scholar-in-residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies (www.marktwainstudies.com) at Elmira College in Elmira, New York.

He also told Fox News Digital in an interview, "It is inescapably and irrepressibly American in all its beauty and horror."