The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Tom Sawyer, twelve or thirteen and living with his Aunt Polly in the Mississippi River town of St Petersburg, spends the book's early chapters running the usual mischief of small town boyhood, tricking his friends into whitewashing a fence for him and courting Becky Thatcher, the judge's daughter, with the single minded devotion of a boy who has just discovered romance. The story darkens considerably when Tom and his friend Huckleberry Finn sneak into a graveyard at night and witness the murderous Injun Joe kill a man, letting an innocent drunkard, Muff Potter, take the blame until Tom finally finds the courage to testify and clear him. Tom and Becky later become lost together in a network of caves during a school picnic, days spent nearly starving in the dark before Tom finds a way out, unaware until afterward that Injun Joe, hiding in the same caves from the law, has been sealed inside and starves there. Tom and Huck, who had earlier stumbled onto part of Injun Joe's hidden loot, recover more than twelve thousand dollars in buried gold once the danger has passed, a fortune that sets both boys up for life, and the book ends with the respectable Widow Douglas taking Huck in and Tom already scheming his next adventure, a boys' robber gang.

Twain writes the whole book with an affectionate, faintly satirical distance from his own childhood, drawing the town of St Petersburg directly from Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up, and the murder plot gives what could have been simple boyhood comedy real stakes without ever losing its warmth. It reads quickly and its chapters work almost as self contained episodes, well suited to being picked up and put down, though the graveyard murder and the cave sequence carry genuine tension.

A San Francisco fireman named Tom Sawyer, celebrated for helping rescue ninety passengers from a burning ship, claimed ever afterward that Twain had borrowed his name.