Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
is Mark Twain’s “other” book, the one, it is said, that prepared the way for his masterpiece,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
and in which the hero of that work was born as a secondary figure. There is much truth in this formulation.
Huck Finn
is indeed Twain’s masterpiece, perhaps his only great novel. In directly engaging slavery, it far surpasses the moral depth of
Tom Sawyer,
and its brilliant first-person narration as well as its journey structure elevate it stylisti cally above the somewhat fragmentary and anecdotal
Tom Sawyer.
Yet it is important to understand
Tom Sawyer
in its own terms, and not just as a run-up to
Huck Finn.
It was, after all, Mark Twain’s best-selling novel during much of the twentieth century; and it has always had a vast international following. People who have never actually read the novel know its memorable episodes, such as the fence whitewashing scene, and its characters—Tom foremost among them—who have entered into national folklore. The appeal of
Tom Sawyer
is enduring, and it will be our purpose here to try to locate some of the sources of that appeal.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
was Mark Twain’s first novel (the first he authored by himself),
¹
but it is hardly the work of an apprentice writer. By the time this book was published in 1876, Samuel L. Clemens was already well known by his pen name Mark Twain, which he had adopted in 1863 while working as a reporter in Nevada. At the time of the novel’s publication, he was in his early forties and beginning to live in an architect-designed home in Hartford, Connecticut. He had been married to his wife, Olivia, for six years, and two of his three daughters had been born.
²

Up to this point, Twain had been known as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. His story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” first published in 1865, had made him famous, and the lecture tours he had given in the United States and England in these years had been well received. His books
The Innocents Abroad
(1869), which satirizes an American sightseeing tour of the Middle East that he covered for a newspaper, and
Roughing
It (1872), an account of the far west based on his own experiences there, were great successes. Both works were first published in subscription form, and they quickly advanced Twain’s reputation as a popular writer. His publication in 1873 of
The Gilded Age,
a book coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner dramatizing the excesses of the post-Civil War period, confirmed his place as a leading social critic.