The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

About This Book

St. Petersburg, Missouri, is a drowsy little town on the bank of the Mississippi River, the kind of place where nothing much happens and everybody knows everybody else's business. Into this quiet world Mark Twain drops Tom Sawyer, a boy of about twelve who has never in his life met a rule he did not want to bend. Tom lives with his Aunt Polly, who is raising him after his mother's death, and who spends most of her days trying — without much success — to turn him into a respectable young man. The novel opens in the middle of one of their long-running battles. Tom would rather be swimming, hunting for treasure, or play-acting as a pirate or an outlaw than sitting in a schoolroom, and he has a talent for turning punishment into opportunity. Alongside him are his half-brother Sid, who is happy to tattle; his friend Joe Harper; and Huckleberry Finn, the town's homeless boy, whose complete freedom makes him the envy of every child in St. Petersburg and the horror of every parent. When a new girl named Becky Thatcher moves to town, Tom's summer gets more complicated still. What begins as a string of funny, small-scale adventures gradually opens onto something larger and darker. Twain lets his young hero wander out past the safe edges of village life, and Tom finds that the world beyond them does not always play by boyish rules. Part comedy, part adventure story, and part portrait of a vanished American childhood, the book asks what a boy does when a game stops being a game.

Tom Sawyer is one of the first books in American literature to take a child's inner life completely seriously — his boredom, his showing off, his terror in the dark, and his slow, uncomfortable discovery that having a conscience costs something. Middle school readers meet Tom at almost exactly the age when they are working out the same questions he is: how much of who you are is performance, when it is worth risking your reputation to do the right thing, and what it means to grow up without giving up your imagination. The book is also genuinely funny, fast-moving, and full of scenes — the whitewashed fence, the funeral, the cave — that have become part of the shared furniture of American culture. Reading it gives students both a great story and the keys to a hundred references they will meet for the rest of their lives.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. Think of a time you talked your way out of a chore or a punishment. What made your argument work, and what does that skill say about you?
2. The children in this book roam a whole town and a river valley without adult supervision. How is that different from the freedom young people have today, and what is gained or lost either way?
3. What makes someone popular among their friends but disapproved of by adults? Why do those two kinds of reputation so often point in opposite directions?
4. Have you ever known something important that you were afraid to tell? What would it take to make you speak up?
5. This story was set about forty years before it was written, by an author remembering his own childhood. How reliable do you expect a grown-up's memory of being twelve to be?
6. What do you think a small American river town in the 1840s looked, sounded, and smelled like on a hot summer day?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• Freedom versus respectability: the book keeps measuring the pull of adventure against the pull of being considered a good, civilized citizen.
• The growth of conscience: watch for the moments when Tom's sense of right and wrong starts to outweigh his fear of consequences.
• Superstition as a way of explaining the world: notice how often the boys use charms, signs, and rituals to feel in control of things they cannot control.
• Performance and audience: Tom rarely does anything without imagining how it will look to somebody, and much of the comedy comes from that need to be watched.
• Play turning real: track the places where a game, a dare, or a pretend adventure crosses over into genuine danger.
• The gap between a community's stated values and its actual behavior, especially in church, in school, and in how the town treats its outsiders.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), who grew up in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, and drew on those boyhood years for nearly everything he wrote. Before he became an author he worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and a newspaper reporter in Nevada and California, and the pen name he chose came from a riverboat call for safe water. He became famous for humorous sketches and travel writing, but his lasting reputation rests on the novels he set along the river, above all The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its darker sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain wrote in the plain, spoken American voice of ordinary people rather than the formal literary English of his day, and later writers credited him with teaching American literature how to sound like itself.

The novel was published in 1876, the year of America's centennial, but Twain set it roughly forty years earlier, in the 1830s or 1840s — a deliberate look backward at a pre-Civil War river town that no longer existed by the time he wrote. That world is recognizable in the book's details: children work as well as play, medicine is mostly guesswork and patent tonics, whipping is a normal school punishment, and religion, gossip, and superstition shape daily life in equal measure. It was also a slaveholding society, and Twain does not hide that fact; the book contains casual racial attitudes and language, including the name given to one character, that were ordinary in the world he was describing and are offensive today. Reading Tom Sawyer means reading a historical document as well as a comic adventure, and noticing where the author is gently mocking his town's assumptions and where he is simply repeating them is part of the work.