The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

About this book

First published 1876 · The London edition came first · Never out of print

Mark Twain set the book in St Petersburg, a small town on the Mississippi modelled closely on Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up. In his preface he wrote that most of the adventures had really happened: one or two were his own, the rest belonged to boys he had been at school with. Tom, he said, was a combination of three of them. Huck Finn he drew from life, from Tom Blankenship, a poor and half-wild boy who lived near the Clemens house and answered to nobody.

It was published in London in June 1876, six months ahead of the American edition, which was the first to carry illustrations. Huck Finn, introduced here, went on to narrate his own novel in 1884. Tom's whitewashing trick, talking other boys into paying him for the chance to paint a fence, has been retold and borrowed ever since.

The copy on this shelf is the full original text with the illustrations from the Project Gutenberg edition.

Chapters

A long one: read it a chapter a night.

1. Contents
2. Illustrations
3. Chapter I
4. Chapter II
5. Chapter III
6. Chapter IV
7. Chapter V
8. Chapter VI
9. Chapter VII
10. Chapter VIII
11. Chapter IX
12. Chapter X
13. Chapter XI
14. Chapter XII
15. Chapter XIII
16. Chapter XIV
17. Chapter XV
18. Chapter XVI
19. Chapter XVII
20. Chapter XVIII
21. Chapter XIX
22. Chapter XX
23. Chapter XXI
24. A Vision
25. Chapter XXII
26. Chapter XXIII
27. Chapter XXIV
28. Chapter XXV
29. Chapter XXVI
30. Chapter XXVII
31. Chapter XXVIII
32. Chapter XXIX
33. Chapter XXX
34. Chapter XXXI
35. Chapter XXXII
36. Chapter XXXIII
37. Chapter XXXIV
38. Chapter XXXV

More to read aloud