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Cover of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain

  • 253 pages · about 4 hours
  • First published 1876
  • 879 editions
  • Free to read
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1 About this book

Tom Sawyer is a mischievous boy of twelve or so who lives with his Aunt Polly in St. Petersburg, a small town on the Mississippi River, in the 1840s. He skips school, talks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him, falls for the new girl, Becky Thatcher, and roams with Huckleberry Finn, the outcast of the town. One night in the graveyard the two boys witness a crime, and the secret weighs on them through a summer of pirate games, treasure hunting and real danger. Mark Twain based the town on Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up, and published the novel in 1876; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is its sequel.

  • Adventure
  • Male friendship
  • Race relations
  • Humor
  • Friendship
  • 19th Century
  • Novel
  • Children

2 What to expect

A comic novel of boyhood in a small Mississippi River town in the 1840s, built from episodes: a whitewashed fence, a first romance, playing pirates, a graveyard at midnight. A darker thread about a crime the boys witness gives it suspense. It is nostalgic, playful and gently satirical about adults, lighter than Huckleberry Finn, and it uses the racial language and stereotypes of its time, most plainly in its villain.

Good for readers who want: a classic of American boyhood, humor and adventure, and small-town life on the Mississippi.

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4 About Mark Twain

1835–1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He has been praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature".

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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