The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (published 1876) is a very well-known and popular story concerning American youth. Mark Twain's lively tale of the scrapes and adventures of boyhood is set in St. Petersburg, Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of adventures many boys can imagine: racing bugs during class, impressing girls, especially Becky Thatcher, with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi river.
One of the most famous incidents in the book describes how Tom persuades his friends to do a boring, hateful chore for him: whitewashing (i.e., painting) a fence.
Tom Sawyer also appears in three other Mark Twain books — Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Of the books, Huck Finn is considered by far to have the most literary merit, with Tom Sawyer being more of a youth-oriented adventure story.
The story of Tom Sawyer has been made into a motion picture several times, from the first in 1917 starring Jack Pickford as Tom to Disney's 1995 Tom and Huck. In the 2003 film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom is added as an adult secret agent, possibly to augment the British cast with an American character.
External links
- Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Twa2Tom.html). Illustrated public domain text.
- RSS Edition (http://rss.duchs.com/twain/tom-sawyer/) of the text
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (http://mark-twain.classic-literature.co.uk/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/) - Full text in easy to read HTML format.
- Adventures of Tom Sawyer (http://www.mtwain.com/Adventures_Of_Tom_Sawyer/index.html) - searchable, indexed e-text.
- Template:Gutenberg
- CliffsNotes (http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-2.html)de:Die Abenteuer des Tom Sawyer