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    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward)
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward)
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward)
    Ebook336 pages4 hours

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward)

    By Mark Twain

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    Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is a much loved and classic work of American literature. It is the story of Tom, a rambunctious young lad who lives with his Aunt Polly. Tom is a boy who doesn’t much like going to school and throughout the book does everything he can to get out of it. Near the beginning of the novel Tom exhibits his keen wit by convincing some boys to paint his Aunt Polly’s fence that he has been punished with having to do for skipping school. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is a story of young love. Tom falls for Becky Thatcher, the daughter of the town Judge, and tries to woe her throughout the novel. It is also the tale of boyhood adventure and camaraderie. Tom and his friend Huckleberry Finn witness a murder, become pirates, are thought to be dead, and search for lost treasure. Set within the Mississippi river valley of Twain’s youth, the novel is a witty portrayal of 19th century American life. This edition is illustrated by Worth Brehm, includes introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward, and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateNov 17, 2015
    ISBN9781420952094
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward)
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, the son of a lawyer. Early in his childhood, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri – a town which would provide the inspiration for St Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After a period spent as a travelling printer, Clemens became a river pilot on the Mississippi: a time he would look back upon as his happiest. When he turned to writing in his thirties, he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain ('Mark Twain' is the cry of a Mississippi boatman taking depth measurements, and means 'two fathoms'), and a number of highly successful publications followed, including The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889). His later life, however, was marked by personal tragedy and sadness, as well as financial difficulty. In 1894, several businesses in which he had invested failed, and he was declared bankrupt. Over the next fifteen years – during which he managed to regain some measure of financial independence – he saw the deaths of two of his beloved daughters, and his wife. Increasingly bitter and depressed, Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-five.

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    Reviews for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward)

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    • 4/5
      A young criminal mastermind-in-training gets into mischief with his disreputable neighborhood friends.
    • 3/5
      This tells the story of a boy, Tom Sawyer, and his best friend, Huck Finn, and some of the adventures they get into. Some of those adventures include ghosts, haunted houses and treasure. I listened to an audio version of this one, narrated by William Dufris. The narrator was very good with amazing expressions, but my mind wandered, anyway. The one mostly couldn't hold my interest. Because of that, I missed a lot, so initially, it almost felt like these were short stories, rather than a novel. A lot of the same characters did return later, and I think storylines were picked up again later, but it was hard to connect everything because I just hadn't focused enough. However, the parts of the book that I did catch, I thought were cute. And, I have to give bonus points for the narrator, so an “o.k.” 3 stars it is.
    • 3/5
      I read this book in my 6th grade. The story was gripping but not my favorite.
    • 4/5
      Even though this book is well over a century old it still holds up! It's funny, witty, and remarkably insightful into the head of a mischievous young boy. The games, and clothes, and manners may have changed; but kids would still be easily able to relate to the games that Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn play. From pirates to adventurers, they know how to have fun with practically nothing but their imagination. And the trouble, lord these two boys know how to get in trouble and worry their families half to death. From running away, getting lost in caves, witnessing a murder and more, Tom Sawyer is the king of trouble. A must read classic!
    • 4/5
      The Adventures of Tom Sawyer depicts the life of an imaginative, troublesome boy in the American West of the 1840s. The novel is intensely dramatic in its construction, taking the form of a series of comic vignettes based on Tom's exploits. These vignettes are linked together by a darker story that grows in importance throughout the novel, Tom's life-threatening entanglement with the murderer Injun Joe.
    • 5/5
      Why had I never read this classic before?... who knows! But i'm glad I have now read it and will move right into listening to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
    • 5/5
      It had been some time since I'd read this, and I'm fixing to read a new novel about Huck Finn's Pap, so I thought it best to repair to the source material first. Being the mother of a boy has certainly changed my reaction to this particular book. What struck me as hilarious fiction once now rings true and is not so mirth-inducing. The nature of the boy as boy seems unchanged though lo, these many years have passed. Twain's not dated in the least, and is still one of the funniest writers ever.
    • 3/5
      I read this in school, probably in 7th grade, because it was assigned. I was not a reader at the time and so really didn't enjoy it very much. I wanted to reread it as an adult. I believe I enjoyed it more this time although I do find Twain wordy, but authors of that time period were. I am not sure the subject of this story is one that would have ever gotten me excited. I even set the book down for many months with only 60 pages to the end. I picked it up and finished it in two quick sittings. I don't think the story is suddenly more interesting to me. I do think I was eager to put the book in my finished pile. I also have to believe that I am better now at reading classics since I have read many more the last few years.
    • 5/5
      Summary: A young boy named Tom Sawyer grows up in a small town. He befriends a slave and goes through many adventures with him. Response: A very fun adventurous book to read. The fact that the characters were based off real people makes it even better. Connection: Have this as a read aloud chapter book discussing the plot with the kids as the teacher reads.
    • 3/5
      Tom Sawyer is a typical Southern boy looking for adventure. I don't think there are many young boys that would skin a cat or fake his own death so that he might attend the funeral, but the mischief of such a boy has always been there...and will always be there, too! Tom lives with his auntie and while he is well loved he is always looking for ways to run away. His sidekick, Huck Finn is eager to join him in adventures "down river." Both are "smarties" as my grandfather would say. Showing off for their peers, and besting the adults -there is never a dull moment in Tom Sawyer's world.
    • 4/5
      I think I was supposed to read this in college. But never did. There were more important things to do like... (never mind).It was time to make up for the mistakes of my youth and take in a classic. That the audiobook was narrated by Nick Offerman was a bonus that moved Tom Sawyer to the top of my to-read list.
    • 4/5
      The 100th anniversary of Twain's death is April, 21 2010. Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother, Sid, in the Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. His best friend (buddy) and companion of adventures Huck Finn helps Tom to invent how to avoid school, and get fun night and day. The main themes are: children looking for trouble, adults as adults always do, and humorism tinged with satire. Sometimes Tom disappears in the Huck's shadow, and sometimes Tom and Huck work together: these passages are most successful with Twain's job. For example:Huck: 'When you going to start the gang and turn robbers?'Tom: 'We'll get the boys together and have the initiation tonight, maybe.'Huck: 'Have the which?'Tom: 'Have the initiation.'Huck: 'What's that?'Tom: ' It's to swear ... etc etc The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a classic book suitable for all ages.
    • 5/5
      Tom Sawyer was a little boy who was very mischievous. He went to live with his aunt. He didnt always follow the rules. He was forced to white wash the fence as punishment for some of the bad things he did. He tricked a lot of people into do stuff for him that he didnt want to do. He an Huck Finn went on a lot of adventures. Once Huck fell through the roof of the church and he faked his death. Then Becki found him and she was so mad when she found of that Huck was faking it the whole time. This book is known by a lot of people but most of them dont read it. They just know the main parts. i encourage people to read this. it is a fun read.
    • 3/5
      Borderline 3.5 stars, but not quite. Mainly because I didn't begin to truly enjoy the story until 2/3 of the way through.

      This is the first time I have ever read Mark Twain, and wanted to read this as a precursor to Huck Finn. I respect Mark Twain and his influence on many popular authors. For me, this particular novel does not hold water against some of the other American greats (Steinbeck, Edgar Allen Poe, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc).

      A lot can be said in regards to the portrayals of African-Americans and Native Americans in the book (particularly the character "Injun Joe"), and Tom Sawyer is often censored or banned due to the language. Without a doubt, parts of the novel were certainly uncomfortable to this modern reader. I actually appreciated this, as it gives a glimpse of what life was like--from the perspective of Mississippi River dwelling, Southern, white children--in the pre-Civil War South. Racism and all. I enjoyed the satirical approach and exaggeration to some of the customs and superstitions of that community during that time period.

      Having said that, I concurrently read some of Twain's (Sam Clemens') other writings on American Indians, and it is atrocious. Product of the times or not, it left a bitter aftertaste while reading Sawyer. Hence the 3 stars.

      I do feel any use of this text in school should include a discussion on racism, fear, discrimination, freedom, etc.
    • 4/5
      This book was one of my favorties as a child. I found Tom to be fun and relational. Twain's mastery at portraying realistic characters from this era is amazing. Great Book! Read and have fun.
    • 3/5
      generally a fan of Twain, i didn't really enjoy this one as much as i expected to. i had read selected excerpts of this book as a child in a book of short stories and remembered enjoying them, but as an adult i have a vantage that makes the hyjinx of this child less than amusing.i attribute it somewhat to the cultural divide between myself and the post-civil war south. the behavior seen as customary or appropriate for a pre-adolescent boy at that time and place seems appallingly bad to my mind. what's more, the tolerant attitude displayed toward Tom by his aunt serves to reinforce the behavior she rails against. self-assured and cocky, i fail to sympathize with this child on almost any level. the callous way he regards (or fails to regard) the feelings of others is not charming in the least. and when i cannot identify with my hero, i'm left fairly cold.i also felt certain elements of the plot were not only fantastic, but repetitive. a child can only disappear so many times and muster the panic of the town, yet it seems Tom can go missing again and again and warrant the despair of all around him every time anew. as far as it goes, i enjoyed the casual language and the cadence of the story shows the deftness of Twain in his element, but i simply failed to find anything endearing about his portrayal of a child he meant to paint as a scamp but whom i can only see as a wretched brat.
    • 4/5
      Tom is very brave boy.He likes adventure and he can get food on his own.When he met troble, he solve it by himself.I want to imitate his active behavior.
    • 4/5
      I'd forgotten what a little trouble maker Tom was. It was a nice enjoyable read.
    • 3/5
      Mark Twain's prose is lovely, and walks a fine line between describing the rural South in ways which are sentimental or derogatory. But it is at the end of the day a children's book for boys, about Indians and buried treasure and running away and getting lost in caves, which while it is endearing and lovely is not sock-rocking.
    • 3/5
      I have heard about this American classic for so long, and I love other Twain books, I thought it was going to be the end all of end alls, but I was disappointed.
    • 3/5
      Snakes and snails and puppy dogs' tails, that's what Tom Sawyer, the essence of little boys everywhere, is made of.This book is fun and light and mischievous. Tom finds himself in trouble throughout the book (usually a side effect of his adventures). His zealous nature and active imagination annoys and endears everyone around him- including the reader.This was my first time reading this book and I only wish I had picked it up when I was younger because I would have taken more delight in it. It's an excellent YA read and a sufficiently entertaining and quick read for an adult. It is a classic for a reason and certainly worth the read no matter your age.
    • 5/5
      illustrations by notman rockwell are tipped in. boards have tan, burlap covers
    • 3/5
      The title is pretty self-explanatory - although I read this book at least 5 years ago, I still remember loving it. The dialogue was slightly difficult for me to get through at the time, but it was everything a book should have: great characters, coherent storyline, and good narrative.
    • 3/5
      To borrow a phrase from Ceridwen, I'd like to punch this book in the nose. Don't get me wrong; Mark Twain's novel is engagingly written and probably a timeless classic for its rich depictions of rural life in the antebellum South; it's just that the "lovable rascal" schtick doesn't work for me. It isn't really the book I have an issue with; it's Tom Sawyer himself I'd like to punch. He's been an icon of carefree boyhood antics for nealy 150 years, and as such he's been a stone in my shoe for as long as I've known him. My mother's dogeared copy from her own childhood has been floating around our household for decades, both predating my own appearance, and remaining after I departed for college. When somebody keeps a book around that long, and it's as lovingly worn as Mom's Tom Sawyer you just know it made an impression at some point. As my mother's only son, I can assure you that to some significant degree, Tom imprinted himself in her imagination as a sort of rough guideline of what a growing boy should be: a spirited imp who passes lazy summers fishin' with his buddies, getting into rough-and-tumble adventures in the great outdoors, swimmin' at the swimmin' hole, and layin' on the hillside chewin' a long stem of grass while lookin' at clouds, &c. That's fine, if that's what you're into. The problem was, that's not what I was into. Twelve year old Brian of 1980 was absolutely nothing like twelve year old Tom Sawyer of 1876. Brian didn't give a fuck about fishing or getting into brawls with the neighborhood boys (just for spirited fun of it) or any of that other damn stuff. If left to my own devices, I would have spent my summers reading in my room, building models, listening to music on my cool cassette player and probably watching more tv than I should have. Introversion isn't a crime, you know... but Tom made his unwelcome influence known more times than I can recall, when I'd be contentedly engaged in one of the above sedentary activities, and Mom would come by and say something like "What are you doing in here on such a beautiful day? You should go outside and play!"To which I responded (although not usually aloud) "Play? What do you think I'm doing here?" But my play didn't really count as "play" in Mom's book. It was Tom's play I was supposed to be engaging in. I had a general sense that "go out and play" probably involved some sort of team sports, which I was not much a fan of, or some vague kind of frolicking in the sunshine, the specifics of which eluded me. Once I went outside though, I never knew exactly what I was supposed to do. More often than not, when shoo'd out of the house, I'd just bring my book with me, and read in the yard. Occasionally Mom would get more aggressive in her efforts and send me away on my bicycle, not to return for a specified time interval. Mostly I'd ride around then, or occasionally drop in on friends to play board games, or some other decidedly non-Sawyeresque activity. Those were the days I knew Tom was conspiring with Mom, whispering like a ghost in her ear to disrupt my favorite pasttimes, and replace them with boyhood romps more alligned with the ideals propegated by Mark Twain and Walt Disney (another of my childhood enemies).My dislike for Tom only grew when I got around to reading his book. I could hardly believe it! Sneaking out of the house late at night? Lying? Not doing chores? Crawling around in prohibited caves? Stealing? Getting into fights?? What the hell?!?!? This is all stuff I would have gotten in trouble for, had I actually done it! Tom Sawyer was like an infuriating sibling who never got held to account; a Bart Simpson, if Bart Simpson wasn't remotely funny. And this was the boy I was supposed to be like?? It was a bitter mixed message; a situation where you just couldn't win. When I look back on the book now, I only recall a few specifics. One of them is the famous fence painting scene. Tom tricks his friends into helping him paint a fence by convincing them how much fun it is. He stands there, whistling and painting away, telling his buddies what a great time he's having, until pretty soon they are begging to be allowed to participate. He refuses at first- wanting to keep the "fun" for himself, but eventually reluctantly remits. I think he even charges them money for the pleasure. What a manipulative bastard. If he were alive today, he'd probably be running a sweatshop somewhere, inducing seven year olds to make Nike sneakers for 30 cents an hour (without bathroom breaks). Or maybe he'd be working as a Director for the Federal Reserve. I can picture him in a press conference, the skinny blonde freckled kid of yesteryear now grown into a doughy, pale late middle aged fat man with bloodshot eyes, jowls, excessive nose and ear hair, and male pattern baldness. He'd stand there with his script, sweating under the camera lights in his ill-fitting suit, and tell the American public how lucky we all are that the Fed is going to "save" us from economic collapse with quantitative easing and a big "liquidity" injection of worthless paper money which will destroy the value of our hard-earned savings. Then he and his Goldman Sachs buddies would duck into a back room to do some lines of blow with Becky Thatcher, laughing all the while at what a bunch of suckers we all are.Fuck you, Tom Sawyer.
    • 4/5
      Twain's bold themes are wonderfully depicted in this novel where Tom gets into all sorts of mischief. I love Twain's literary style and humor. Worth reading it at least once, if not more.
    • 1/5
      for me it was not a good book. But for someone who likes nature and 1800 lifestyle this would be a good book for you.
    • 4/5
      The standard by which all other boys' adventure stories are judged. More episodic than I'd have liked (so that it sometimes was hard to follow which actions were related to which), but still fun to read. I can now say that I've read (more or less) Tom Sawyer, rather than just scrubbing my toe in the dirt and looking abashed when the topic of literary classics comes up.
    • 4/5
      Looking over the reviews of this book I noticed that they swing from being 'a classic account of boys on the loose in frontier America' to 'I want to punch Tom Sawyer in the face.' One reviewer has commented on how is mum owned a dog-eared copy of this book from before he was born to after he left home to go to college (and if he doesn't want it, I'll be more than happy to take it off his hands) which made me realise how our parent's taste in literature can and does differ from our own. I grew up knowing about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but I have never actually read the books, and to be honest, never even realised that there was a book wholly dedicated to Tom Sawyer until a couple of years ago, and based on my parents collection of books (namely Hard Science-fiction, which is not surprising for a father who is a physicist, and detective fiction dominated by Agatha Christie) the works of Mark Twain never really entered my sphere of influence.However I recently picked up a collection of his works and decided to see what these stories were about, and I must admit that I actually quite enjoyed this tale of mischievous boyhood. Seriously, letting the entire town grieve for your death and then rocking up at your funeral really does take some guts, and I must admit that it would have been something I would have loved to have done when I was a kid. In fact, the impression that I get from this story is that it is simply Samuel Clements (using a psuedonym) recounting a lot of the mischief he and his friends got up to as children but rolling it all into one character so as to protect the guilty.There are two things that really stand out to me about this book and the first is that I found it very readable, which is something that I generally do not expect from 19th Century literature. True Clements does get bogged down into detail, but there is enough action to keep us interested, and the banter among the main characters it really enjoyable to follow, particularly when Sawyer convinces young Becky Thatcher to become engaged to him, explaining to her what engagement is from a conservative, respectful, point of view. The second thing that stood out was that it gives us a very clear view of a time gone by, an age of innocence in the American mid-west. In a way it takes us away from the troubles of today and puts us in a world where things did not seem as bad.Granted, there is a murder, and there are troubles with children getting lost in caves, but even then, we glimpse a more innocent time in the United States, though there are a few interesting quotes, such as Negroes always being liars (which raises the question of whether Samuel Clements was a southern sympathiser, despite the book being written after the Civil War, though the events are flagged as being set prior to the said war). I also see a number of influences on children's literature of today, not to say that people didn't write books for children back then, but he does say at the beginning that while this book is written for boys, he does hope that adults would enjoy this story as well.I must finish off about the story of whitewashing the fence, which is the first event in the book. Poor Tom has got himself into trouble, and has been punished by having to paint the fence, something he does not want to do, but somehow he manages to get others to do it in his stead. He does this trick (I believe) by asking somebody to pay him for the privilege, and Clements then points out afterwards that if we are paid to do something, then it is considered work, and is dull and boring, but if we pay to do something, then it is entertainment and we do it with gusto, so his theory is that if we get people to pay to do the things we don't want to do, then we will get things done a lot better and a lot quicker, than we would otherwise (and there have been movies made about how people pay to become ranchers), but I suspect that this is something that only foolish boys would do, and us adults are (I hope) probably a lot smarter than this, though I do actually wonder about it sometimes (such as celebrities paying to sleep out on the streets, seriously, if you really want to experience poverty, then give up all your riches - don't give it up for a short time, that, to me, is little more than a publicity stunt).
    • 4/5
      I had never read the Adventures of Tom Sawyer except in a childhood version in Golden Books or something like that. I skipped right over to read Huck Finn. While this is definitely a children's book in many ways, Twain writes in such a way that adults still enjoy Tom and his picaresque adventures, both as nostalgia for our own childhoods and because the adult voice of Twain cannot help inserting his snide commentaries on humanity.
    • 4/5
      American classic, all boys and men should read often

    Book preview

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated by Worth Brehm with Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward) - Mark Twain

    cover.jpg

    THE ADVENTURES

    OF TOM SAWYER

    By MARK TWAIN

    Introductions by PERCY HOLMES BOYNTON and BERTHA EVANS WARD

    Illustrated by WORTH BREHM

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

    By Mark Twain

    Introductions by Percy Holmes Boynton and Bertha Evans Ward

    Illustrated by Worth Brehm

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5208-7

    eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5209-4

    This edition copyright © 2015. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Cover Image: A detail of the frontispiece illustration by Worth Brehm which first appeared in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York, Harper & Brothers. 1910.

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    img1.jpg

    DOES A BOY GET A CHANCE TO WHITEWASH A FENCE EVERY DAY?

    CONTENTS

    First Introduction

    Second Introduction

    Preface

    Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Chapter V

    Chapter VI

    Chapter VII

    Chapter VIII

    Chapter IX

    Chapter X

    Chapter XI

    Chapter XII

    Chapter XIII

    Chapter XIV

    Chapter XV

    Chapter XVI

    Chapter XVII

    Chapter XVIII

    Chapter XIX

    Chapter XX

    Chapter XXI

    Chapter XXII

    Chapter XXIII

    Chapter XXIV

    Chapter XXV

    Chapter XXVI

    Chapter XXVII

    Chapter XXVIII

    Chapter XXIX

    Chapter XXX

    Chapter XXXI

    Chapter XXXII

    Chapter XXXIII

    Chapter XXXIV

    Chapter XXXV

    Chapter XXXVI

    Conclusion

    BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

    First Introduction

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was written at the very mid-point of Mark Twain’s life, and in the middle of the first half of his career as an author. It is drawn from his own boyhood experiences in what was the far West during the 1840s, it is typical of his methods of story-telling at their best, and in literary history it represents his fresh and definite contribution to fiction for boys and girls.

    I

    Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, the fifth of the six children of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. The parents, unhappy in their attempts at settlement among the Tennessee mountains, had come out the year before, carried westward on the boom tide. In 1839 they moved to the river town Hannibal, the seat of Tom Sawyer’s adventures. John Clemens, never successful, made a slender living as justice of the peace until the promise of better things came with his election as clerk of the circuit court; but in the campaign for this modest post he contracted a fatal illness from which he died in 1847. In the period that followed, the boy Samuel was in the printing business, first with a printer named Ament and then with his brother Orion on a Hannibal paper, and then for more than a year in a wandering succession of jobs that carried him to his first sight of the Atlantic and home again. From 1857 to 1861 his restless spirit was appeased by his daily fortunes as understudy and eventually successful pilot on the Mississippi. With the opening of Civil War hostilities the dangers of this vocation sent him ashore and from 1861 to 1866 he roughed it in the West, rounding out this chapter with his experience as a newspaper man in California and as a special correspondent on the first steamship voyage to Honolulu. In the next year, 1867, his knowledge of the world was further extended by his famous trip as one of a personally conducted party to the Holy Land on the steamship Quaker City.

    Mark Twain began the latter half of his life and entered into real celebrity with the publication of The Innocents Abroad. He had acquainted himself with all sorts of democratic types; he had practised his pen in journalistic writing; he had met with unqualified success as a lecturer; and he had developed a simple independence of judgment that he was never to lose. Sixty-seven thousand copies of The Innocents were sold in the first year, and his fame was made.

    His literary work for the remainder of his life can be grouped in three rough classes: first, the travel reminiscences which began with The Innocents Abroad (1869), and was continued with Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Following the Equator (1897); second, fiction, including the five volumes for boys, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Other Stories (1896); and the fiction for adults, The Gilded Age (with Charles Dudley Warner, 1873), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The American Claimant (1891), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1907); and third, a miscellany of prose, extending all the way from Sketches New and Old (1875), past its highest point, Joan of Arc (1896), to Christian Science (1907), Is Shakespeare Dead? (1908), and a succession of posthumous volumes.

    In contacts and experiences the latter half of Mark Twain’s life was varied and spectacular. For twenty years he lived in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a neighbor of Charles Dudley Warner, an intimate of the Rev. Joseph Twitchell, and the frequent host of William Dean Howells, his friend of four decades. He made money with ease, spent it profusely, and invested it with the reckless optimism of Colonel Sellers himself. After his failure for a large amount, a later friend, Henry H. Rogers, took his affairs in hand and by good management enabled him to meet all debts and to enjoy a handsome income during his closing years. He was recipient of many university honors, culminating with a Doctorate of Letters from Oxford, and toward the end voyaged on a sea of banquets and speechmaking in high and holy causes. But it was a forlorn sea. The loss of his only son in babyhood and his daughter Susie in early maturity had made him a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; his wife died in 1904, and his daughter Jean under peculiarly tragic conditions in 1909. In his last years he was immensely popular, but melancholy withal and strangely isolated. He died of angina pectoris in 1910.

    II

    Mark Twain made his reputation as a humorist. He arrived at maturity in the ten years just after the Civil War, when a succession of newspaper men were writing with a fresh outburst of jocosity which was related to the American humor of older days, but a great departure from most of it. They did not regard themselves as literary men at all. They could not have written, and would not have cared to write, productions which would have won the regard of Irving’s readers, the devotees of the old annuals which at their worst Mark Twain derided in Tom Sawyer. They wrote for the newspaper world, with no respect for beauty of style or literary tradition; and they drew their material from the talk of the common people, as Lincoln had done with all his stories, putting it in the idiom of the unlettered and frequently distorting it into illiterate spelling. Lovers of refined literature, like Edmund Clarence Stedman, were shocked and disturbed. The whole country, wrote the author of Pan in Wall Street, owing to the contagion of our American newspaper exchange system, is flooded, deluged, swamped beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic [bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit. But it was a surging tide that cast up something more than worthless flotsam, in the shape of a few real treasures of the deep—the rarest of which was Mark Twain.

    If there had been no such general movement this original genius would still have written in his own original way. The other men did more to prepare the public for Mark Twain than to train Mark Twain for the public. He was like them in the breeziness of his humor, but he imitated none of them. In particular he did not rely on the vagaries of his spelling for any of his amusing effects. He had, to paraphrase his own statement, a singularly fine and aristocratic respect for homely and unpretending English; and he treated punctuation as a delicate art for which he felt the greatest deference. Without doubt he was often vulgar, as were the people about whom and for whom he wrote—as Franklin and Lincoln were. He had, wrote Mr. Howells, the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish; and I was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not quite bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. Yet even at this point Mark Twain, possibly assisted by his severest critic, Mrs. Clemens, made a distinction between what he wrote for the public and his private speech and correspondence. His pages are utterly free from filth.

    His humor is derived from his never-failing and often extravagant use of the incongruous and the irrelevant. Often this came out in similes and metaphors that were both startling and startlingly appropriate. Sometimes it emerged in his impertinent personalities. Mark Twain was one of Lowell’s backwoods Charlemagnes of empires new—

    Who, meeting Caesar’s self, would slap his back,

    Call him Old Horse, and challenge to a drink.

    His humor appeared often in his sober misuse of historical facts. And it was developed most elaborately in hoax passages, where, in his violation of both fact and reason, the author looked like the innocent flower, but was the serpent under it. A particular charm was inherent in the informality and apparent casualness of his work. What he wrote seemed to be for his own pleasure, and what he spoke, no matter how carefully prepared, to be the casual improvisation of the moment. Beyond question he literally enjoyed himself when he was giving hilarious enjoyment to others; the free play of his fancy was a kind of self-indulgence. Even in his most serious book, Joan of Arc, he stops to rollick from time to time in very human but totally unhistorical passages. Yet under all his frolicsome gaieties and beneath the surface ironies in all his books there is, as in the pages of every genuine humorist, a solid sense of the realities of human life. What he set down in the preface to The Innocents Abroad he might have said, with a slight change, of his work as a whole: "Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a purpose which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him." So he wrote out of the fullness of his heart as well as out of the abundance of his humor. There was in him a natural acumen which, for want of a better name, we may call wisdom. His instinctive perceptions were usually right.

    III

    Says Huckleberry Finn in his opening paragraph: "You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another." This is only Huck’s version of the opening paragraph in the preface to Tom Sawyer: Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture. Many of the home incidents in Tom Sawyer really happened. Sam Clemens was one of the three boys who composed the hero; Huck Finn was drawn from Tom Blakenship; Sid was from Henry Clemens; Laura Hawkins was the original of Becky Thatcher, and Mrs. Clemens of Tom’s Aunt Polly. The cave was a reality which tourists may visit today. The treasure-digging adventure had a foundation in fact, though the treasure-finding did not. Any readers of Mr. Paine’s master biography of Mark Twain will recognize in the opening chapters the combination of religious orthodoxy and popular superstition into which the child of a slave state grew up. And the references to the as yet undreamed-of telegraph, the newly invented lucifer matches, the old sentimental annuals, and the social customs of the day, carry us back to a period that already seems dimly remote.

    The material, it is evident, is all native, homespun stuff. What happened might have happened with minor variations—probably did take place—in many a river town in the Missouri-Illinois tract. But the most vital element in the book is the presentation of the material—nineteen-twentieths of it—from the boy-and-girl point of view. Tom’s attitude toward discipline and toward duty, his powers of self-analysis, his honest delight in lying, his essential truthfulness, his vague idealism compounded from heroic legend and the dime novel, his brutality and his sensitiveness, are all elements in the natural boy.

    And Tom is nowhere so natural as in the book in which he first appeared. In Huckleberry Finn he is a one-sided creation with his much-overworked infatuation for complex adventure derived from Dumas and his school. The later stories use Tom’s name rather more than his character. Tom Sawyer Abroad is a flying-machine fantasy, and Tom Sawyer, Detective, the account of a plot taken from an old-time Swedish criminal trial and transferred to America.

    IV

    It is one of the delights of Mark Twain’s work that in both style and structure it always seems so spontaneous and uncalculated. Yet this effect was actually the result of a conscious and highly developed art. How to Tell a Story reveals how clearly aware he was of his own processes, and in random passages such as the letter to the young London editor, quoted by his biographer, he discussed most explicitly his theories of diction and his pride in his own punctuation. It would be a mistake, therefore, to think of Tom Sawyer as a casual string of episodes; and an examination of its structure shows that it was anything but this. The first half is largely a picture of village life in St. Petersburg, as Hannibal is renamed. Tom’s character is presented against the background of home, of day-school, of Sunday-school, and the village streets. The group picture of the Sunday-school service is supplemented with the graduation evening, and the runaway camp and the graveyard episode introduce the element of out-of-door romantic adventure. But the graveyard scene, which occurs early in the book, furnishes the clue to the whole latter third which has to do with the buried treasure, the reintroduction of Indian Joe, the adventures in the cave, and the final enrichment of Tom and Huck. The book ends where it begins, with Tom in town and indoors, and if it is not concluded in the happily ever after sense, this is because as the history of a boy it has to be stopped without being completed.

    As in his other books, Mark Twain did not allow security of general structure to act as a straight-jacket. In every volume it was in the nature of him to indulge in occasional random play. Sometimes this appeared in charming nature passages such as those which introduced various of the chapters. At other times it was released in characteristic passages of cumulative humor such as those which recounted the fence whitewashing, the showing off in Sunday-school, the encounter of the dog and the beetle in church, and the literary absurdities of the graduation program. And finally, the author’s freedom of movement vented itself in scattered passages of interest only to grown-ups, such as that on the distinction between work and play, the characteristics of the typical Sunday-school superintendent, the absurdity of quack medicines, and the flatness of literary fine writing. On the whole, however, Mark Twain used material which was capable of standing without expository props, and above all things he abjured the inveterate and intolerable sermon that waggled its crippled tail at the end of so much juvenile literature in the days of Tom Sawyer.

    V

    In the preface to Tom Sawyer from which quotation has already been made Mark Twain says, Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. If he was concerned to retell to grown-ups the strange undertakings of their childish pasts, he was no less interested to remind the younger generation of what queer books they were sometimes contented with.

    There were apparently three kinds of story for the Boy of the mid-century. One was the heroic tale of knight, yeoman, and outlaw, grandiloquent, remote, but stimulating to the boyish imagination and therefore tolerated by Mark Twain, and genially burlesqued by him, rather in the spirit in which Thomas Love Peacock played with the same material. The second was the later romance of the Dumas-Scott type—a type for which Mark Twain had as little respect as Jane Austen had had for the Gothic romance which preceded it. And the third was the Sunday-school book, the sort of thing suggested by The Wide, Wide World, Faith Gartney’s Girlhood, Sandford and Merton, and the moralistic pedantries in which Elsie and Rollo were voluminously enshrouded. He had turned them all explicitly to scorn, in various passages scattered through his writings (in Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn, in The Connecticut Yankee, and so on) as well as in such single sketches as the story of the bad little Jim, although there never was a bad James in the Sunday-school books that had such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life; and the story of the good little Jacob Blivens, who did the best he could, but didn’t come out according to the books.

    So in writing of his own boyhood, under the name of Tom Sawyer, he was bound to develop the sort of story that seemed to him honest and wholesome in practical protest against the mawkish insincerities of the ordinary food for babes. It must be about a boy who is essentially sound, although not too good to be true. It must tell of his escapades, because for story material these are more interesting than the uninterrupted routine of good behavior. In its effect on the youthful reader it must be neither moralizing nor demoralizing. In this respect it differs from Peck’s Bad Boy, which had little to relieve its mischief and mendacity. At the same time it differs from Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy in being very much more of a story and less of a chronicle.

    The appeal has been a double one—to the boy because the story is ingenious, stirring, and just thrilling enough to have the glamour of romance without being incredible; to the average business man because it reminds him with amusing clarity of his forgotten self and helps him to a reunderstanding of his sons. Many a story-writer has followed Mark Twain into Tom Sawyer territory—one, Mr. Tarkington, with pre-eminent success. And even he apparently owes a debt of the clearest sort, for the first occurrence of the name he has made famous is Brer Penrod in Huckleberry Finn.

    VI

    Throughout Tom Sawyer the essential Mark Twain appears. He is apparent in the genuine, understanding of human nature as he had come to know it in such a town as St. Petersburg. He reveals himself in his feeling for the group and in his none too biting satire of group behavior, particularly of institutional life, and he declares himself in the fundamental wholesomeness of his general philosophy; for in Mark Twain the moral sense was as deeply grounded as his humor. In Tom Sawyer, as in his other books, he was, by implication, a champion of the simple virtues—common honesty, fidelity to the family, kindness to the weak or suffering and to the primitive peoples. He attacked only unworthy objects, the different forms of selfishness and insincerity which offer a fair target for the satirist.

    Not until the last years of his life did readers begin to take Mark Twain seriously; now they are coming to appreciate him. He has been fortunate in his literary champions—biographers, critics, and expositors—and incomparably so in the loving interpretation, My Mark Twain, by his intimate friend, William Dean Howells. This concludes: Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any that I have ever known, the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth. . . . It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying. . . . Next I saw him dead. . . . I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it; something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell; Holmes—I knew them all—and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

    PERCY HOLMES BOYNTON

    1920.

    Second Introduction

    THE BOOK

    Perhaps it would be just as well to warn young people in the very beginning against reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The author himself says of his hero, He was not the Model Boy of the village. In the very first chapter, Tom has a fight with a strange boy who dares to walk abroad well-dressed on a week-day; and is called a bad, vicious, vulgar child by the stranger’s indignant mother. Before the end of the fifth chapter, he has established several facts damaging to his reputation: he can always detect colicky symptoms or find his sore toe mortified when the thought of school becomes unbearable; he will resort to subterfuge rather than wash behind his ears; he hates Sunday school and entertains himself during church with a pinchbug when he should be listening to the moral discourse intended for sinners such as he. Girls who are afraid of dead rats—treasure worth trading for in the eyes of Tom—and boys who prefer school to camping out on Jackson’s or some other island are hereby warned that Tom Sawyer is no proper acquaintance for them. We have no record that Tom ever voluntarily sought the society of that perfect example of boyhood, young Willie Mufferson, but we find plenty of evidence that he envied richly the ragamuffin Huck Finn and reveled in his irresponsible companionship. Only readers who like boys as they are, are invited to read this book; only those who have youthful faults of their own to remember and who with real comprehension of boy nature can say with Aunt Polly, "I could forgive

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