The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, and somehow the book has not slowed down since. The setup is simple. Tom is a boy living with his Aunt Polly in St. Petersburg, a sleepy town along the Mississippi modeled on Twain’s own Hannibal, Missouri. He skips school, lies to his aunt, talks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him, and spends most of the summer either avoiding trouble or running directly into it. The fence-painting scene alone has worked its way into how Americans talk about clever salesmanship.

But the book gets darker fast. Tom and Huck Finn witness a murder in the graveyard. They watch an innocent man get framed for it. They get lost in a cave with the killer. Becky Thatcher faints. There is buried treasure. There is genuine peril. It is easy to read this as a children’s book, and many readers first meet it that way, but Twain wrote it for adults remembering childhood. The voice is warm without being sentimental. The Mississippi runs through every page. If you have never read Twain, this is where to start before going on to Huckleberry Finn.