Mike Fink
Character Key Number:
3126
Display Name:
Mike Fink
Sort Name:
Fink, Mike
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?:
No
Biography:
Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator of Requiem for a Nun puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived.