The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in a small town along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the town of "St Petersburg", inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up. In the story's introduction, Twain notes: "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest of those boys were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture." The odd superstitions touched upon were all preva- lent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story -- that is to say, thirty or forty years ago. Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. Not counting The Gilded Age, which was co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain's first novel. By the time MT died, it had become an American classic, and it remains perhaps the best-loved of all his books among general readers. When it first came out in 1876, however, it was comparatively a failure. Despite MT's determination "that Tom shall outsell any previous book of mine," the American Publishing Co. sold less than 24,000 copies in the book's first year (compared, for example, to 70,000 for Innocents Abroad in a comparable period). As an imaginative act, Tom Sawyer led directly on to the greatness of Huckleberry Finn and MT's other fictions of childhood or the Mississippi valley. As a commercial disaster, it pushed MT in the direction that would lead him to create his own publishing company. This is a great ebook that comes in PDF or Plain Text format

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