The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

About the Book

Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, drawing on his own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, which he fictionalized as St. Petersburg on the Mississippi. Tom Sawyer, an orphan raised by his Aunt Polly, is the most imaginative and least governable boy in town, he skips school, orchestrates elaborate games that extract labor from his friends through psychological misdirection, falls in love with Becky Thatcher, and stumbles into genuine danger when he and his friend Huck Finn witness a murder in the graveyard. The novel moves between comic episodes and the genuinely sinister subplot involving Injun Joe, who plans revenge on people who testified against him years before.

Themes and Significance

Twain wrote the book as a nostalgic account of boyhood that he was careful to distinguish from the conventional sentimental juvenile fiction of his era. Tom is imaginative and resourceful, but he is also manipulative, the whitewashing scene, where he persuades other boys to pay him for the privilege of doing his work, is presented as clever rather than admirable. The novel celebrates child's play, but it does not sentimentalize children or suggest they are naturally virtuous. Injun Joe's menace is real rather than cartoonish; his death, by starvation in the sealed cave, is not played for comic relief.

Why Read It Today?

Tom Sawyer is often assigned to children and therefore approached as simpler than it is. What Twain built into the novel, the psychology of performance for social approval, the difference between imaginative play and actual danger, and the specific texture of mid-nineteenth-century Mississippi River culture, belongs to the same observational precision he applied to darker material in Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. The book is the most immediately enjoyable of the three, which has sometimes led to its being taken less seriously than it deserves as a document of how communities manage the gap between their values and their behavior.