The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Reading time: about 5 h
Length: 70,701 words · 154 pages
Structure: 35 chapters · 2 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Victorian

Tom Sawyer whitewashes a fence by making other boys pay to do it, witnesses a murder in a graveyard at midnight, runs away to be a pirate, attends his own funeral and gets lost in a cave with Becky Thatcher. Mark Twain published the book in 1876, drawing on his own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri; it was his first novel written alone.

Lighter and more nostalgic than its sequel, it is the book that made the Mississippi village of St Petersburg one of the permanent places of American fiction.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Part of American Literature.

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About the author

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · Victorian

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), born in Florida, Missouri, and raised in Hannibal on the Mississippi. He was a printer, a river pilot, a prospector and a journalist in Nevada and California before The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1865) and The Innocents Abroad (1869) made his name. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889) followed. He lectured around the world to recover from bankruptcy in the 1890s and died in Connecticut.

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