I too agree with Gregg and Terrell.   Yes, Mark Twain loved history.  But
he was first and foremost a maker of stories--a yarnspinner.

Twain could be absolutely finicky about tiny writing details, esp. those
involving diction.  But when it came to broad construction....?  Well, I
loved the passage Gregg quoted where Twain said he would  move a state if
he needed to.   As Mark cheerfully said of himself  elsewhere, he was a
"jackleg novelist."

For me, the most extreme example from Huckleberry Finn would be the very
ending:  A children's adventure book demands a happy ending, so on her
deathbed Miss Watson frees Jim.   Yeah, sure.  Jim, who is 1) a runaway
slave and thus "an ungrateful nigger."   2)  Jim, who is the presumed
murderer of  Huck Finn!!   So much for historical accuracy (and I suspect
legality), let alone any shred of  psychological realism.

A few other examples of Twain's casualness:
--Once they realize they have passed Cairo, Huck and Jim decide to continue
south until they can buy a canoe and paddle back north.  Huck says they
don't want to snitch one because the theft might set people after
them....This from a boy who is constantly hooking things!  Yet when a canoe
does turn up, Huck casually says only that one morning he found one.  He
makes no big deal about it at all, as though just maybe Mark Twain had
forgotten that  the Great Canoe Quest was supposedly what was
compelling  Huck and Jim to continue downstream.

And a few lines later the Duke and King come aboard, so now Twain has a
somewhat more plausible excuse for continuing the journey southward--Huck
and Jim are virtual prisoners of the con men.

The glaringly plain truth is that Twain wanted to send his boy down the
part of the river that he knew and loved, and would grab whatever excuse he
could.

--In his own book, which essentially takes place over one summer, Tom
Sawyer is surely every age from 10 or even 9 to about 14.  Further, he has
enough time-filling adventures over that summer to last more like a year,
even though a bout of sickness keeps him abed for a good stretch.

--As his little preface all but admits, in A Connecticut Yankee Twain
patches together laws and customs from hundreds of years of history, plus
having his people speak a lingo perhaps closer to watered-down Tudor
English.  Hank, his supposedly uneducated hero, sometimes sounds like
himself, but other times sounds remarkably like Mark Twain.  He has read
books about the French Revolution, Renaissance autobiographies, etc. etc.

At the real risk of causing offense, I wish  to suggest that many teachers
and scholars of "creative writing" in fact have very little belief in
creativity, and perhaps not much  grasp of it.  They mouth the word
"creativity" with respect; but notice (for example)  how often when
analyzing a novel or story a critic--especially one of academic bent--will
assume that every character really MUST be based on someone the author has
known.

This whole discussion of historical accuracy leaves me smiling to recall
something Gore Vidal once said.  Perhaps for the fiftieth time he had been
asked about  the "source" of this or that in one of his books:  "Damn it,"
Vidal snarled in exasperation, "I'm a novelist!  I MAKE THINGS UP!!"

Mark Coburn