Mark Twain - Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)  

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FROM THE PAGES OFTHE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing itnamely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

(page 18)

If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

(page 18)

Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family worship: it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.

(page 26)

Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance.

(page 43)

Dad fetch it! This comes of playing hooky and doing everything a fellers told not to do. I might a been good, like Sid, if Id a triedbut no, I wouldnt, of course. But if ever I get off this time, I lay Ill just waller in Sunday schools!

(page 69)

It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization.

(page 84)

Homely truth is unpalatable.

(page 126)

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

(page 130)

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boys life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

(page 141)

A robber is more high-toned than what a pirate isas a general thing. In most countries theyre awful high up in the nobilitydukes and such.

(page 202)

MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835. When Sam was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a small town later immortalized in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After the death of his father, twelve-year-old Sam quit school and supported his family by working as a delivery boy, a grocers clerk, and an assistant blacksmith until he was thirteen, when he became an apprentice printer. He worked for several newspapers, traveled throughout the country, and established himself as a gifted writer of humorous sketches. Abandoning journalism at points to work as a riverboat pilot, Clemens adven tured up and down the Mississippi, learning the 1,200 miles of the river.

During the 1860s he spent time in the West, in newspaper work and panning for gold, and traveled to Europe and the Holy Land; The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) are accounts of those experiences. In 1863 Samuel Clemens adopted a pen name, signing a sketch as Mark Twain, and in 1867 Mark Twain won fame with publication of a collection of humorous writings, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. After marrying and settling in Connecticut, Twain wrote his best-loved works: the novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the nonfiction work Life on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, he continued to travel and had a successful career as a public lecturer.

In his later years, Twain saw the world with increasing pessimism following the death of his wife and two of their three daughters. The tone of his later novels, including The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, became cynical and dark. Having failed as a publisher and suffering losses from ill-advised investments, Twain was forced by financial necessity to maintain a heavy schedule of lecturing. Though he had left school at an early age, his genius was recognized by Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University in the form of honorary doctorate degrees. He died in his Connecticut mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.

THE WORLD OF MARK TWAIN ANDTHE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

1835	Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born prematurely in Florida, Missouri, the fourth child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens.
1839	The family moves to Hannibal, the small Missouri town on the west bank of the Mississippi River that will become the model for the setting of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
1840	American newspapers gain increased readership as urban popula- tions swell and printing technology improves.
1847	John Clemens dies, leaving the family in financial difficulty. Sam quits school at the age of twelve.
1848	Sam becomes a full-time apprentice to Joseph Ament of the Missouri Courier.
1850	Sams brother Orion, ten years his senior, returns to Hannibal and establishes the Journal; he hires Sam as a compositor. Steamboats become the primary means of transport on the Mississippi River.
1852	Sam edits the failing Journal while Orion is away. After he reads local humor published in newspapers in New England and the Southwest, Sam begins printing his own humorous sketches in the journal. He submits The Dandy Frightening the Squatter to the Carpet-Bag of Boston, which publishes the sketch in the May issue.
1853	Sam leaves Hannibal and begins working as an itinerant printer; he visits St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. His brothers Orion and Henry move to Iowa with their mother.
1854	Transcendentalism flourishes in American literary culture; Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden.
1855	Sam works again as a printer with Orion in Keokuk, Iowa.
1856	Sam acquires a commission from Keokuks Daily Post to write humorous letters; he decides to travel to South America.
1857	Sam takes a steamer to New Orleans, where he hopes to find a ship bound for South America. Instead, he signs on as an ap prentice to river pilot Horace Bixby and spends the next two years learning how to navigate a steamship up and down the Mississippi. His experiences become material for Life on the Mississippi and his tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
1858	Sams brother Henry dies in a steamboat accident.
1859	Samuel Clemens becomes a fully licensed river pilot.
1861	The American Civil War erupts, putting an abrupt stop to river trade between North and South. Sam serves with a Confederate militia for two weeks before venturing to the Nevada Territory with Orion, who had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as secretary of the new Territory.

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