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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. (Compare the article on stone
soup).
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 mostly British cast with an American character.
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Mark Twain 