The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

About this book

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain’s first novel written on his own, following The Gilded Age, which he co-wrote with Charles Dudley Warner. It draws on his own childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi, which becomes the fictional town of St. Petersburg. Twain said in his preface that most of the adventures had really happened and that Tom was drawn from several boys he had known.

The book has been a steady favorite since publication and has never gone out of print. It is written in the third person and is lighter in tone than its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with which it is often paired. Several of its episodes, including the whitewashed fence and the boys attending their own funeral, have passed into general knowledge even among people who have never read it.

The story

Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly, his half-brother Sid, and his cousin Mary in a river town in Missouri. He skips school, trades junk with other boys, falls in love with a new girl named Becky Thatcher, and runs with Huckleberry Finn, the son of the town drunk, whom all the respectable mothers forbid their children to see.

One night Tom and Huck go to the graveyard at midnight to try a cure for warts and witness a murder. Fear of the killer, Injun Joe, hangs over the rest of the book. Tom and Huck run away to an island with their friend Joe Harper to be pirates, return in dramatic fashion, and later go hunting for buried treasure. The final chapters take Tom and Becky into a cave outside town.

Themes and historical context

Twain wrote the book in the early 1870s, looking back at the 1840s from a country transformed by the Civil War and by industry. The St. Petersburg of the novel is a place of Sunday schools, temperance societies, and quack remedies, observed with affection and a satirist’s eye for the gap between what adults say and what they do. The children’s world has its own elaborate rules about marbles, superstitions, and oaths signed in blood, and Twain treats those rules with the same mock seriousness.

The book is also a study of a particular kind of boyhood: showing off, bargaining, and the desire to be a hero in front of the town. Tom’s conscience operates intermittently but does operate, and the plot turns on the moments when he chooses honesty over safety.

Although it was marketed partly as a book for children, Twain wrote to his friend William Dean Howells that it was really for adults, and it has always had both audiences. Slavery is present in the background of the town without being examined, a subject Twain took up directly in the sequel.

Who should read it

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is about 70,000 words in thirty-five short chapters, and it is episodic, so it can be read in sittings. The narration is clear, the dialogue uses a light dialect, and the humor is broad. It suits children from around ten upward, adults reading it for the first time, and anyone who wants to read Twain in order before moving on to Huckleberry Finn. Modern readers should be aware that the villain’s name and characterization reflect the prejudices of the period.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #74 was prepared by David Widger. The “Complete” in the catalog title indicates the full novel; Gutenberg also lists the book in separate parts under other numbers.