Mark Twain was born Samuel
Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835,
and grew up in nearby Hannibal, a small Mississippi River town. Hannibal
would become the model for St. Petersburg, the fictionalized setting
of Twain’s two most popular novels, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The
young Clemens grew up in a prosperous family—his father owned a
grocery store as well as a number of slaves—but he was sent out
to work at the age of twelve after his father’s death. As a young
man, he traveled frequently, working as a printer’s typesetter and
as a steamboat pilot. In this latter profession he gained familiarity
with the river life that would furnish much material for his writing.
He also gained his pen name, Mark Twain, which is a measure of depth
in steamboat navigation.
Twain enlisted in the Confederate militia in 1861,
early in the Civil War, but he soon left to pursue a career in writing
and journalism in Nevada and San Francisco. His articles and stories
became immensely popular in the decades that followed. On the strength
of this growing literary celebrity and financial success, he moved
east in the late 1860s and married Olivia
Langdon, the daughter of a prominent Elmira, New York, family. Twain
and Langdon settled in Hartford, Connecticut; there Twain wrote The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he published in 1876.
Twain proceeded to write, among other things, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and two
sequels to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Tom
Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom
Sawyer, Detective (1896). He died
in 1910, one of America’s most beloved humorists
and storytellers.
While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer retains
some of the fragmented, episodic qualities of Twain’s earlier, shorter
pieces, the novel represents, in general, a significant literary
departure for Twain. He toned down the large-scale social satire
that characterized many of his earlier works, choosing instead to
depict the sustained development of a single, central character.
Twain had originally intended for the novel to follow Tom into adulthood
and conclude with his return to St. Petersburg after many years
away. But he was never able to get his hero out of boyhood, however,
and the novel ends with its protagonist still preparing to make
the transition into adult life.
Twain based The Adventures of Tom Sawyer largely
on his personal memories of growing up in Hannibal in the 1840s.
In his preface to the novel, he states that “[m]ost of the adventures
recorded in this book really occurred” and that the character of
Tom Sawyer has a basis in “a combination . . . of three boys whom
I knew.” Indeed, nearly every figure in the novel comes from the
young Twain’s village experience: Aunt Polly shares many characteristics
with Twain’s mother; Mary is based on Twain’s sister Pamela; and
Sid resembles Twain’s younger brother, Henry. Huck Finn, the Widow Douglas,
and even Injun Joe also have real-life counterparts, although the
actual Injun Joe was more of a harmless drunk than a murderer.
Unlike Twain’s later masterpiece, The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer concerns
itself primarily with painting an idyllic picture of boyhood life
along the Mississippi River. Though Twain satirizes adult conventions
throughout The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he leaves
untouched certain larger issues that The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn explores critically. The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer never deals directly with slavery, for example,
and, while the town’s dislike of Injun Joe suggests a kind of small-town
xenophobia (fear of foreigners or outsiders), Injun Joe’s murders
more than justify the town’s suspicion of him. Because it avoids
explicit criticism of racism, slavery, and xenophobia, the novel
has largely escaped the controversy over race and language that
has surrounded The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To this day, The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer remains perhaps the most popular
and widely read of all Twain’s works.
