The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (published 1876) 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. (Compare the article on stone soup.)

This was the first novel to be written on a typewriter.

Literary significance & criticism

Sales of Tom Sawyer were lukewarm at best. It initially sold less than a third as many copies as Twain's Innocents Abroad, which sold about 70,000 copies during that time period. By the time of Twain's death, however, Tom Sawyer was both an American classic and a bestseller.

Tom Sawyer also appears in three other Mark Twain books:

Of these, Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom Sawyer is only a minor character, is considered to have, by far, the most literary merit.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The story of Tom Sawyer has been made into a motion picture several times. The first was in 1917, starring Jack Pickford as Tom, and the most recent Disney's 1995 Tom and Huck. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, adapted for stage by Ken Ludwig, appeared on Broadway during the 2001-02 season, along with a one-hour children’s version that ran at the Kennedy Center and toured the country for two years.

External links

Classic-Literature.co.uk – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (full text in html format), Mark Twain (1876)
MTwain.com – The Complete Works of Mark Twain (searchable, indexed Twain library, including complete Tom Sawyer text)
Titiland.com – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (online book in html)
Virginia.edu – Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (illustrated public domain text)
Free typeset PDF ebook of Tom Sawyer and other Twain books optimized for printing, plus extensive Twain reading list

Gutenberg project

Subscription service

DUCHS.com – Tom Sawyer (RSS "feedreader" edition: subscription service e-mails a portion of the text each day)

Synopses

CliffsNotes.com – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
SparkNotes.com – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer