The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The classic adventures of one of American literature's most beloved characters from Mark Twain, one of America's best-loved writers.

Here is a lighthearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return into the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, and Aunt Polly. It is a universal world of attending school and playing hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a boy who might be the young Mark Twain himself.

There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer--even in the darkest moments, affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it re-creates the vanished dreams of youth. For younger readers it unveils the boundaries of tantalizing horizons still to come. And for everyone, it reveals the mind and heart of one of America's best-loved writers.

With an Introduction by Robert Tilton
and an Afterword by Geoffrey Sanborn

About the Author:

In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835-1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental--and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."

Robert Tilton is a Associate Professor of English and Department Head at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative and co-author of Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend, George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths, Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal, and Lee and Grant, and has written the Introduction to the Signet Classics edition of Cooper's The Deerslayer.

Geoffrey Sanborn, Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, is the author of The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader, Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori, and Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions.