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.
 |
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky in Injun Joe's cave. |
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: #
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (
1885)#
Tom Sawyer Abroad (
1894)#
Tom Sawyer, Detective (
1896)
Of these,
Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom Sawyer is only a minor character, is considered to have, by far, the most literary merit.
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.
*
List of characters in the Tom Sawyer series*
Free ebook of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at
Project Gutenberg*
Classic-Literature.co.uk â€"
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (full text in html format), Mark Twain (1876)
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MTwain.com â€"
The Complete Works of Mark Twain (searchable, indexed Twain library, including complete
Tom Sawyer text)
*
Titiland.com â€"
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (online book in html)
*
Virginia.edu â€"
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 listGutenberg project
*
Free ebook of Adventures of Tom Sawyer at
Project GutenbergSubscription service
*
DUCHS.com â€"
Tom Sawyer (RSS "feedreader" edition: subscription service e-mails a portion of the text each day)
Synopses
*
CliffsNotes.com â€"
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer*
SparkNotes.com â€"
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
