The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Sure, Mark Twain's matchless sequel, "The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn," is a bona fide masterwork and my nominee for the Great American novel. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is a delightful childhood adventure, but not as thematically rich and more skewed towards the Young Adult section of the library. So what? One is the appetizer, the other is the main course, and you're the winner. Young Tom is a relatively well-off boy (compared to his virtually homeless Irish pal Huck Finn), living in mid-19th-century Missouri with his Aunt Polly. Tom is a natural troublemaker and slacker who would Rather Be Fishing than going to school, his mischief aggravated all the more because he's got a goody-goody younger brother Sid always coming foremost in Aunt Polly's affections. But Tom is also a dreamer and much given to telling `whoppers' (you can see an autobiographical bit of Sam Clemens creeping in here) and engineering bits of drama, such as when he, Huck and Joe Harper (I guess Twain never got around to penning "Adventures of Joe Harper") run away from home to live wild on a Mississippi island, are taken for dead, and have the opportunity to show up and their own funeral to witness the mourning by good Christian folks who generally disdained them while they were "alive." The part of the book that is best known (apart from the classic fence-painting scene) is when Tom and Huck accidentally witness a grisly murder and framing of an innocent man at the hands of the evil Injun Joe, and Tom (and his girlfriend Becky Thatcher) wind up hunted by the killer in a network of caves. It's to Mark Twain's great credit as a storyteller and humanist that the finale even rouses a twinge of sympathy for the villain. Some of the 19th-century attitudes and racial stereotypes could offend readers today (then again, just about anything could offend readers today), but this is the voice of a cocky young boy in the slave-holding South, and the writer renders it faithfully.