Full Description
This classic novel of childhood is set in fictional St. Petersburg, a town based on Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Twain's recounting of Tom Sawyer's many escapades is by turns nostalgic, satiric, wise, and hilarious. While this novel is often considered mainly as the precursor to Twain's great work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is abundantly worth considering for its own deft and loving transformation of autobiography into fiction.
In addition to the full text of the novel based on the first American edition, complete with a selection of the original illustrations by True Williams, this Broadview edition provides a wide range of appendices that place the novel in the context of 1840s rural America as well as 1870s literary America. These include materials on the composition and marketing of Tom Sawyer, selections from other "boy books" of the period, and historical documents relating to temperance, children's literature, and schools.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Mark Twain: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text and Illustrations
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Appendix A: Composition, Marketing, and Reviews of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Composition
From Twain's "Boy's Manuscript" (c. 1870)
From "Unpublished Chapters from the Autobiography of Mark Twain," Harper's Monthly Magazine (August 1922)
The Tom Sawyer manuscript
Twain's Correspondence with William Dean Howells (1875-76)
Marketing: Advertisement of Subscription Books (1876)
Contemporary Reviews
William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly (May 1876)
Anonymous, New York World (1 January 1877)
Anonymous, New York Times (13 January 1877)
Appendix B: Twain's Memories of Hannibal
Letter to Will Bowen (6 February 1870)
Hannibal in 1848
From Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)
From Twain, "Chapters from My Autobiography," North American Review (2 November 1906)
From Twain, "Villagers of 1840-43" (1897)
Slavery in Hannibal
From Twain, "Chapters from My Autobiography," North American Review (1 March 1907)
Advertisement for Slaves (1848)
Appendix C: Bad Boys and Boy Books
Bad Boys
From B.P. Shillaber, Mrs. Partington's Knitting Work, and what was done by her plaguy boy Ike (1880)
From Twain, "The Story of the Bad Little Boy" (1865)
Boy Books
From Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869)
From Charles Dudley Warner, Being a Boy (1877)
From William Dean Howells, A Boy's Town (1890)
Appendix D: A Small-Town American Childhood in the 1840s
School
From McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book (1846)
From the Friends Infant School (1838)
Sunday School
From "The Sunday-School Child" (1845)
From "The glass of whiskey" (1845)
The Temperance Movement: Announcement in the Hannibal Gazette (17 June 1846)
Games: From The Boy's Story Book for Winter Evenings (1838)
The Circus: Advertisement in the Hannibal Gazette (October 1847)
The Minstrel Show
Song from "Bone Squash Diavolo" (1835)
Dialogue, "Mosquitoes" (1902)
Reading
Lawrence Lovechild, "The Deceitful Little Boy" (1840)
From Samuel Griswold Goodrich ("Peter Parley"), "Bill Vacant and Henry Hawkseye," Robert Merry's Annual, for all seasons (1840)
From Jacob Abbott, Rollo Learning to Read (1855)
From Stephen Percy, Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters (1845)
From Ned Buntline, The Black Avenger, Story of the Spanish Main, The Weekly Novelette (1859)
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