This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, but it does not appear in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or any other of Twain's works.
In 1919, nine years after Mark Twain's death, the adage was attributed to Mark Twain by a magazine called "Standard Player Monthly." Before that, other publications attributed the same quote to London preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, an ancient Chinese proverb, a Virginian named John Randolph, and even Thomas Jefferson. I...
This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, but it does not appear in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or any other of Twain's works.
In 1919, nine years after Mark Twain's death, the adage was attributed to Mark Twain by a magazine called "Standard Player Monthly." Before that, other publications attributed the same quote to London preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, an ancient Chinese proverb, a Virginian named John Randolph, and even Thomas Jefferson. I found this information on a website called "Quote Investigator."
Mark Twain penned a lot of popular epigrams, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn certainly has lying vs. truth-telling as one of its central themes, but no form of that particular adage is written in the pages of the novel. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator claims that Twain's previous novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was the truth, stretched in some places: "That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." This shows the reader that lies vs. the truth will be a main theme of this novel. There are a couple of points in the story where Huck chooses to tell the truth because it would be better and safer than lying, and there are other characters who definitely lie to Huck, producing all kinds of trouble for him, so Huck learns that lying, although easier, is bad and that it's generally better to tell the truth.
Learn more about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .
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