The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A boy in a small town on the Mississippi avoids work, witnesses a murder, attends his own funeral and gets lost in a cave. Twain wrote the novel for adults and children at once, and it is more carefully constructed than its episodic reputation suggests.
The town is based on Hannibal, Missouri, and the details are drawn from Twain's own childhood. The darker material, the murder and the cave, keeps the book from becoming mere nostalgia. It is the sunnier companion to Huckleberry Finn, and it is best read first.
Public-domain status
First published in 1876. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Mark Twain died in 1910, so this work has been free to republish there since 1981.
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