The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a novel by Mark Twain, published on 9 June 1876, about a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1830s and 1840s in the fictional town of St Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where the author lived as a boy.

The book was a commercial failure at first and ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime. Along with its 1885 sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature, and Twain claimed it was one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter. Tom is an orphan of twelve or thirteen who lives with his aunt Polly.

The comic set pieces are what carry the book's reputation, beginning with the whitewashing of the fence, which is described as having become part of American legend. The burials, the island, the treasure hunt and the cave sequence are all episodic rather than parts of one continuous plot, which is why the novel reads as a sequence of childhood summers rather than as a single story.