Sparkling with mischief, jumping with youthful adventure, Mark Twain's TOM SAWYER is one of the most splendid re-creations of childhood in all of literature. It is a lighthearted romp, full of humor and warmth. It shares with its sequel, the masterpiece HUCKLEBERRY FINN, not only a set of unforgettable characters - Tom, Huck, Aunt Polly and others - but a profound understanding of humanity as well. Through such hilarious scenes as the famous fence-whitewashing incident, Twain gives us a portrait - perceptive yet tender - of a humanity rendered foolish by its own aspirations and obsessions.

Written as much for adults as for young boys and girls, TOM SAWYER is the work of a master storyteller performing in his shirt sleeves, using his best talents to everyone's delight.

Mark Twain’s life illustrates a point he makes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer- that there is no single, simple formula for success. A school dropout at eleven, he spent twenty years in a variety of jobs. He was a typesetter, but, by his own admission, not a very good one. He piloted riverboats, but the Civil War put him out of work. He tried soldiering- and deserted. He spent a disastrous year mining gold and silver.
In desperation, he became a newspaper reporter in Nevada. Running afoul of the law, he fled to San Francisco, found another newspaper job- and got fired.
Twain was thirty now, and about this time he sat in his room, pointed a gun at his head, and contemplated pulling the trigger. It was a good thing he held back.
For he soon discovered that he had a talent for “literature,” as he wrote his brother, “of a low order- i.e., humorous.” Over the next two decades, he wrote several books, which made him rich and world famous. Among those books were two of America’s most important contributions to world literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Surely this is the type of startling reversal worthy of Tom Sawyer- the boy who breaks every rule imaginable, longs for a romantic death, and ends up a rich and revered member of his community. How did Twain manage this feat? For an answer, you should take a close look at the man, his art, and the times in which he lived.
Twain was born on November 30, 1835, in the frontier hamlet of Florida, Missouri. His parents named the sickly child, their fifth, Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
(He adopted the pen name Mark Twain in 1863.) In 1839, John Clemens moved his family from their poor, two-room shack in Florida to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Hannibal boasted only 450 citizens when they arrived, but the town seemed destined to thrive and raise the Clemens family’s fortunes with it. Hannibal grew, but the Clemenses did not prosper. Although John Clemens became one of the town’s most respected citizens, he went bankrupt, lost all his property in Hannibal, and died of pneumonia in 1847. Samuel was eleven at the time of his father’s death. His mother, Jane Clemens, took him into the room where his father’s coffin lay and made him promise to behave.
“I will promise anything,” Twain would remember saying, “if you don’t make me go to school! Anything!” “No Sammy; you need not go to school anymore. Only promise to be a better boy,” his mother said. “Promise not to break my heart.” You will hear echoes of Jane Clemens in Tom Sawyer. Twain modeled Tom’s Aunt Polly after his mother, whom he called his “first and closest friend.” Aunt Polly is not Jane Clemens with a different name and a frontier dialect, however.
Jane Clemens was stronger and quicker than Polly. When defending the oppressed, Twain would remember, she was “the most eloquent person I have heard speak.”
For two years after his father’s death, Samuel worked as an apprentice to a Hannibal printer. In 1850 his older brother, Orion, bought a local newspaper. Samuel went to work for him, but Orion ran such an unprofitable operation that Samuel often went without pay.
In 1853, at age seventeen, Samuel set off on his own. For two years he worked as a typesetter in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia before returning to the Mississippi Valley and working once more for Orion, who was now a printer in Keokuk, Iowa.
At this point, Samuel had published several short pieces in Orion’s newspaper and a humorous sketch in a Boston magazine. Yet he had no desire to make writing his life’s work. He left Keokuk in November 1856, and in the spring he persuaded a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River to teach him his trade. He spent the next few years steering steamboats up and down the Mississippi. In April 1861, the Civil War halted river traffic between the North and South and put Clemens out of work.
Clemens was unhappy to leave the river. He loved the work and its high pay.
Besides, as he wrote in 1875, “A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth....” In Chapter 6 of Tom Sawyer, Twain speaks of Huck Finn in similar terms.
“Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will... he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody....”
In Iowa, Samuel’s brother Orion had backed Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 race for the U.S. presidency. His reward was an appointment to a high administrative post in the Nevada Territory. He went with Orion and spent a year unsuccessfully prospecting for gold and silver in Nevada. Broke, he took a job writing for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, where for the first time he began signing his pieces “Mark Twain”- the river call for a depth of two fathoms.
Precisely how he chose that name is a mystery. Clemens said he “confiscated” it from a newspaperman who wrote for the New Orleans Picayune in the 1850s.
However, scholars can find no record of any writer’s using that name before Clemens. In Virginia City, Clemens used the river term in a unique way. He would tell bartenders to “mark twain”- that is, to add two more drinks to his bill. Scholars believe it’s likely he invented the New Orleans journalist story to disguise his pen name’s link to the barroom after he became “respectable” in the East.
After fleeing to California and losing his newspaper job there, Twain wrote sketches for a humor magazine. He published a tall tale in a New York magazine in late 1865. The story- “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”was reprinted in newspapers all over the country, and marked the true start of Twain’s writing career.
In January 1867, he went to New York City to write a series of travel letters for a California newspaper. He continued writing dispatches for the newspaper after he joined a group of wealthy tourists bound for Europe and the Holy Land.
The trip took five months and had two important consequences for Twain.
First, it provided him with material for a book, The Innocents Abroad, which brought him fame when it was published in 1869. Second, the trip led to his meeting Olivia (“Livy”) Langdon, who would become his wife. Livy’s brother had gone on the trip and introduced Twain to his sister afterwards. Twain and Livy were married in February 1870 and went to live in Buffalo, New York. Some scholars believe that Twain’s description of Tom and Becky’s courtship in Tom Sawyer is a parody (take-off) of his own bumpy courtship of Livy.
The couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1871. There Twain wrote Roughing It, a book about his experiences in Nevada and California. Published in 1872, the book added to his reputation as a humorist.
In 1873, he collaborated with a neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, on his first novel. Called The Gilded Age, the novel satirized the political corruption and the mania for speculation that characterized the post Civil War era. The book earned Twain a great deal of money. In 1874 he built his family an extravagant home in Hartford.
Before moving into the home, the family spent the summer in Livy’s hometown of Elmira, New York, where Twain began working in earnest on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He had actually begun the book during the winter of 1872-73, in Hartford, but had put it aside to work on The Gilded Age. Now, in Elmira from April to September 1874, he was able to work almost daily on the project. Soon the writing became forced and artificial. “I had worked myself out,
pumped myself dry,” he wrote a friend. So he put the manuscript aside and wrote a series of articles on his steamboating days, “Old Times on the Mississippi.” It wasn’t until eight months later that he returned to Tom Sawyer.
When the book was finally published in December 1876, the reviews were favorable. Sales, however, were another matter. A Canadian publisher undercut the U.S. edition by flooding the country with a cheap pirated version. Twain’s own publisher sold fewer than 27,000 copies of the novel during the first year. Oddly, sales of Tom Sawyer never really took off until after 1885, when The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared and reviewers began to link the two books in the public’s mind. Since then, Americans have bought millions of copies of the novel.
It is a favorite of both children and adults- a testament to Twain’s genius for enriching his tales of childhood with humor and penetrating insights into human nature.
Most readers agree that Tom Sawyer is Twain’s second-best book. First-place honors must go to Huckleberry Finn, where Twain explores both language and ideas in greater depth. However, Tom Sawyer is probably Twain’s best-loved novel, and its extraordinary success with people of all ages seems to prove it.
To understand Tom Sawyer, it may help to put yourself in Twain’s place- that of a worldly man, nearing forty, who is viewing childhood across the bridge of thirty years. Between Twain and his boyhood stand years of personal travel, trial, and error; a civil war marked with heroism and sacrifice but also greed and cruelty; an end to slavery; and startling developments in industry and communica-
tions. From the vantage point of the post Civil War era, the 1840s must have seemed idyllic indeed- as carefree and innocent as an endless summer.
Primarily, Tom Sawyer is a reminiscence of Twain’s boyhood, which he recalls with a longing for the past. But it is more than a remembrance because Twain has let his broad literary background shape his memories.
Literary sources for Tom Sawyer include Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which contains a grave-robbing scene like the one Tom and Huck witness.
The treasure hunt contains elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Gold Bug.” Although in 1869 Twain claimed to dislike Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy, many readers feel that he borrowed ideas from that book, as well.
Thus, you shouldn’t read Tom Sawyer as Twain’s autobiography. In fact, you even have to read Twain’s real autobiography with a grain of salt, for as he warns at the end of one chapter: “Now then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.” The Hannibal of Twain’s youth was a far rougher and shabbier place than St. Petersburg, Twain’s fictional version of his hometown. A village on the American frontier, Hannibal had a darker side, which Twain only hints at. As a boy, he nearly drowned three times. He watched villagers try- unsuccessfully- to hang an anti-slavery man. He witnessed a hanging, and he watched a man burn to death in a jail cell. He also saw two drownings, an attempted rape, as well as two attempted and four actual murders.
Such experiences helped Twain to understand that life is not a continuous holiday- even for children. Tom’s nightmares are one indication of that, as are Twain’s angry asides about the villagers’ hypocrisies.
Twain doesn’t dwell on life’s darker side in this novel, however. He wanted to write a light-hearted, entertaining book. Yet woven through it are a number of themes that link it to Twain’s later, more philosophical works. (See “Themes” later in this guide.) As he grew older, Twain began to examine the less appealing aspects of human nature more relentlessly. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is peopled with all types of evil, stupid, or mean characters. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), for all its humor, concerns man’s corruptness.
The year Pudd’nhead Wilson was published, business reverses forced Twain into bankruptcy. He embarked on a world tour, lecturing for $1,000 a night. The success of that tour and of Following the Equator, the travel book that came out of it, enabled him to pay his debts.
As he moved toward the end of his life, Twain shed his comic mask and confronted themes of evil and dishonesty with increasing bitterness. This bitterness is evident in such works as “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” a story, and the nonfiction tract, What Is Man? Gnawing financial difficulties and family sorrows were partly responsible for his emphasis on the bleak. His favorite daughter, Susy, died in 1896, his wife in
1904. Another daughter died in 1909. Twain died of heart failure on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut.
For his readers, Twain lives on- a symbol, like Tom Sawyer, of something raw and unyielding in the American character.
Tom’s ability to triumph, whatever the odds, is no doubt a major reason that Twain wrote of him so admiringly. It is surely one reason you will be drawn to Tom, and why you may never forget him.