Tom Sawyer is the young hero of a humorous novel by American author Mark Twain that has become a classic of children’s literature. It was first published in 1870. The full title of the novel is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom is a mischievous but good-hearted boy living in a Missouri town along the Mississippi River in about the 1840’s. The novel’s characters are Tom’s friends, especially Huckleberry Finn, and the adult residents of the town. Twain’s use of realistic American dialect in the novel helped revolutionize American literature.
The novel represents Mark Twain’s first major use of memories of his childhood. Twain modeled St. Petersburg—Tom’s home—after his boyhood home of Hannibal. Tom is irresponsible but shrewd. He and Huck Finn accidentally witness a murder. Tom reveals the real killer, Injun Joe, at the trial of another man accused of the crime. Tom and his girlfriend, Becky Thatcher, eventually find themselves lost in a cave where Injun Joe is hiding. They escape, and Tom and Huck later discover a treasure the killer had hidden.
Twain’s novel has been praised for its nostalgic re-creation of small town American life before the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. The book is also a classic of juvenile literature because of its humor and its realistic portraits of Tom and his friends. Twain wrote three sequels to the novel—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and the short novel Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896).
