The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

About the Book

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a very well-known and popular story concerning American youth. Mark Twain’s lively tale of the scrapes and adventures of boyhood is set in St. Petersburg, Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of adventures many boys can imagine: racing bugs during class, impressing girls, especially Becky Thatcher, with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi River. One of the most famous incidents in the book describes how Tom persuades his friends to do a boring, hateful chore for him: whitewashing (i.e., painting) a fence. This was the first novel to be written on a typewriter.

The adventures and pranks of a mischievous boy growing up in a Mississippi River town in the early nineteenth century.

About the Author

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Twain’s most popular novel, an entertaining boys book and a humorously nostalgic evocation of small-town childhood. Published in 1876, the book has become as popular among boys as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has among girls. About the Introducer John Michael is an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester.