The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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**Title** **The Adventures of Tom Sawyer**
Frontispiece of 1st edition
Author	Mark Twain
Illustrator	True Williams
Cover artist	created by Mark Twain
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Bildungsroman, Picaresque, Satire, Folk, Children's Novel
Publisher	American Publishing Company
Released	1876
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	275pp
ISBN	NA
Followed by	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in the antebellum South or the Missouri in St. Petersburg.

1 Plot introduction
2 Literary significance & criticism
3 Trivia
4 Full book text

[edit] Plot introduction

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer deals with the adventures of boyhood in St. Petersburg, Missouri. It tells of the childhood adventures of Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn: racing bugs, impressing girls - particularly Becky Thatcher - with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi River. The best-known passage in the book describes how Sawyer persuades his friends to white-wash, or paint, a long fence for him.

[edit] Literary significance & criticism

The Sales of Tom Sawyer were lukewarm at first. 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:

Of these, Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom Sawyer is only a minor character, is considered to have, by far, the most literary merit.

[edit] Trivia

In dictations for his autobiography, Twain claimed Tom Sawyer "must have been" the first book whose manuscript was typed on a typewriter. However, typewriter historian Darryl Rehr has concluded that Twain's first typed manuscript was Life on the Mississippi.[1]