The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain

May 2006 · Broadview Press

About this ebook

This classic novel of childhood is set in fictional St. Petersburg, a town based on Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Twain’s recounting of Tom Sawyer’s many escapades is by turns nostalgic, satiric, wise, and hilarious. While this novel is often considered mainly as the precursor to Twain’s great work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is abundantly worth considering for its own deft and loving transformation of autobiography into fiction.

In addition to the full text of the novel based on the first American edition, complete with a selection of the original illustrations by True Williams, this Broadview edition provides a wide range of appendices that place the novel in the context of 1840s rural America as well as 1870s literary America. These include materials on the composition and marketing of Tom Sawyer, selections from other “boy books” of the period, and historical documents relating to temperance, children’s literature, and schools.

About the author

Lucy Rollin is Professor Emeritus of English at Clemson University. She is the author of Twentieth Century Teen Culture by the Decades (Greenwood, 1999) and the editor of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (Oxford University Press, 1996).