The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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Despite the abundance of bildungsroman novels and coming-of-age tall tales that clutter up our bookshelves nowadays, good literary works written about children for adults are truly hard to come by. Without a doubt one of the very best is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the conclusion of which set me on this bender of childhood books written for mature audiences. Although it was difficult to go from Lee to the classics of Twain the step has been taken and the bender continues with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Twain’s classic boyhood novel tells the tall tales and many adventures of young Tom Sawyer, a mischievous boy with a heart of gold and a thirst for freedom and adventure that often gets him into trouble. Beginning with the memorable white washing episode and escalating to a piracy romp, the witness of a murder, an adventure in a dark cave, and the discovery of buried treasure, the story celebrates the magic and imagination of childhood amidst an adult world run by superstition.

Image credit: Encyclopedia Britannica

As Twain writes about the rather grownup adventures and misadventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn there is a clever and inclusive tone to the book that perfectly encapsulates the brevity and significance of childhood: that feeling that anything could be real and one could do anything they set their mind to. In a rather morbid, but fun turn of events the boys really do have proper adventures that have storybook endings that cause them to grow a little in the process. Despite its length, the book proves to be packed to bursting with social commentary as well as captivating insight into a sleepy and superstitious time of human history and, reading it as a modern reader, it proves to be more of a trip backwards through civilisation as well as to a time when innocence –however cheeky and misguided- reigned.

It’s clever, funny, and a book that’s very inclusive of the reader, as Twain occasionally breaks his omniscient narration to speak directly to the dear reader in tangents like so many literary geniuses before him.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was written by Mark Twain and first published in America in 1876.