The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at its core, is satirical; Twain tried to make fun of every aspect of the American South that he found strange, unusual, or just plain dumb. One of the things Twain found foolish were feuds, and what better feud to make fun of than one everyone knew at the time? In his novel, Twain drew from current events, the events happening between the Hatfields and McCoys, to inspire his own feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. The tale of the Hatfield and McCoys is an interesting one. While there had been a few hiccups between the two families in the past, the event most cite as the starting point of the feud was in 1878, when Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The case’s star …show more content…
However, Devil Anse (the patriarch of the Hatfield family) did not approve of this affair, and returned Roseanna back to her family by force. Unlike Shakespeare’s play, however, the relationship between these two families was…unique, to say the least: When Roseanna sought to rekindle her love with Johnse, he did not resume his relationship with her, even though she was pregnant with (presumably) his child. Rather, Johnse married Roseanna’s cousin, Nancy. It is said that Roseanna died of a broken heart. …show more content…
There was no internet, television, or form of social media back then, so information had to travel in limited ways. Because Twain lived in the south at the time of writing Huckleberry Finn, it is entirely possible that he heard about the feud through word of mouth; “Those dern Grangerfords a few states o’er been feuding since the dawn o’ time.” However, a more likely scenario is that Twain discovered the feud through its newspaper coverage (rarenewspapers). Just as people indulge in articles from Buzzfeed and tabloid magazines, newspapers chose the stories that people wanted to read; they chose the stories that had a lot of shock value, and were filled with