The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Twain, Mark J.; Peck, H. Daniel; Peck, H. Daniel

• ISBN13: 9781593080686
• ISBN10: 1593080689
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-01
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics

Summary

Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title--offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords. This edition of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" includes a Biographical Note, Preface, and Afterword by Keith Neilson.

Author Biography

H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College and is the author of Thoreau’s Morning Work and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction.

Table of Contents

The text of The adventures of Tom Sawyer	p. 1
Backgrounds and contexts	p. 181
[Autobiography]	p. 183
Letter to Will Bowen, 6 February 1870	p. 191
The cave at Hannibal	p. 193
Miss Clapp's school	p. 197
The old-time school-discipline	p. 200
Dissection of the dead	p. 201
[The case against dissection]	p. 204
The page that Becky tore?	p. 208
Fire in a liquid form	p. 209
Boy culture	p. 213
[Mark Twain's Missouri]	p. 221
The story of the bad little boy who didn't come to grief	p. 225
The story of the good little boy who did not prosper	p. 228
From Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters	p. 231
Boy's manuscript	p. 239
Correspondence on The adventures of Tom Sawyer	p. 253
[Revisions inspired by Howells]	p. 260
Criticism	p. 263
[Review]	p. 265
The composition and the structure of Tom Sawyer	p. 267
The sanctioned rebel	p. 279
Boy books, bad boy books, and The adventures of Tom Sawyer	p. 290
Masculinity and the logic of sympathy in The adventures of Tom Sawyer	p. 306
Why Mark Twain murdered Injun Joe - and will never be indicted	p. 332
"200 rattling pictures" : True Williams and the imagetext of the first American edition of The adventures of Tom Sawyer	p. 353
Mark Twain : a chronology	p. 379
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

From H. Daniel Peck's Introduction to Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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 stylistically 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), 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.



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.



Indeed, the America reflected in The Gilded Age—an America of greed, corruption, and materialism—may have driven Twain back imaginatively to what seemed to him a simpler time—to "those old simple days", as he refers to them in the concluding chapter of Tom Sawyer. The first significant sign of such a return in his publications was his nostalgic essay "Old Times on the Mississippi," which appeared in 1875.3 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published the following year, belongs to this return to antebellum America, and to the scene of Twain's growing up—Hannibal, Missouri. That the author was able to draw upon his deepest reserves of childhood imagination in this work certainly accounts for much of its appeal. A decade after its publication, he referred to the novel as a "hymn" to a forgotten era,4 and while this characterization oversimplifies The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it also points to key aspects of its composition and literary character.



In the novel, Twain renames Hannibal as St. Petersburg, thus suggesting, as John C. Gerber has said, St. Peter's place, or heaven.5 But heaven, as Twain depicts it, is a real place. Many of the sites and topographical features are identifiable. Cardiff Hill, so important in the novel as a setting for children's games such as Robin Hood, is Holliday's Hill of Hannibal. Jackson's Island, the scene of the boys' life as "pirates," is recognizable as Glasscock's Island. And McDougal's Cave, so central to the closing movement of the novel, has a real-life reference in McDowell's cave. Human structures, like Aunt Polly's house, as well as the schoolhouse and the church, were similarly modeled after identifiable buildings in Hannibal.



The autobiographical origins of the novel are also evident in the characters. In the preface, Twain says that "Huck Finn is drawn from life" (in part from a childhood friend named Tom Blankenship), and "Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew." Schoolmates John Briggs and Will Bowen probably were two of the three boys after whom Tom was modeled, and a good bet for the third is young Sam Clemens himself. Many of Tom's qualities resemble Twain's descriptions of his young self, and several of Tom's experiences—such as being forced by Aunt Polly to take the Painkiller and sitz baths—reflect the author's own. Aunt Polly herself has several characteristics that link her to Sam Clemens's mother, Jane Clemens. And scholars have found Hannibal counterparts for many of the other characters, including Becky Thatcher, Joe Harper, and Ben Rogers, as well as the widow Douglas and the town's minister, schoolteacher, and doctor.

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Excerpted from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.