Illustrator
True W. Williams
The first artist to draw Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and their river town.
On Picturepops™ cards · 5
The life
1839-1897Born Allegany County, New York, USA
Truman W. "True" Williams was a self-taught American illustrator who grew up in Watertown, New York. In the Civil War he served with an Illinois volunteer infantry regiment as a topographical engineer under General Sherman, and afterwards drew for magazines and for Mark Twain's Hartford publisher. He became Twain's most frequent illustrator, working on The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Sketches New and Old and A Tramp Abroad. For the first edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) he made the drawings that gave Tom and Huckleberry Finn their first faces, and he slipped his own name onto a gravestone in one scene. He died in Chicago in 1897. Picturepops cards use his Tom Sawyer drawings.