The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: Context
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a children's novel by Mark Twain that was published in 1876. The book is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, set in the 1840s in a town called St. Petersburg, Missouri—a fictional town based on Hannibal, Missouri. The Aventures of Tom Sawyer was inspired by Mark Twain's own childhood town and experiences in the United States. Twain said that the character of Tom Sawyer was based on three boys he knew growing up, and he later stated Tom Sawyer was based on himself.
Note: Because the book was written in 1876, there are many racist terms used to describe the characters.
A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the main character as they transition from childhood to adulthood. Growth and change of a character are essential to this genre.
While reading The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, think about how Tom Sawyer changes throughout the novel.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer follows the adventures of a young boy named Tom Sawyer, and his friends—most notably, Huckleberry Finn. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is a sequel to Tom Sawyer.
Fun fact: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of the first books to be written using a typewriter!
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Character Analysis
Below are descriptions and analyses of the main characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
Thomas Sawyer
Thomas Sawyer is an adventurous, clever, and mischievous 12-year-old boy. He is always up to shenanigans and is used to getting in trouble. Throughout the novel, Tom Sawyer grows from being an immature boy simply concerned with fun, games, and girls, to becoming a brave hero who helps others. Tom Sawyer learns to stand up for justice in Muff Potter's trial, gets himself and Becky Thatcher out of the dark cave, and comes to be the only person Huckleberry Finn can rely on. Nonetheless, he never loses his spirit for adventure. His character is built both on boyishness and great bravery.
Fig. 2 - The original 1876 edition of Tom Sawyer features a series of illustrations by the artist True Williams.
Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn is a vagabond boy who wanders the town and graveyards. His parents are not around, and he presents a strange symbol of neglect and freedom. Huck Finn is admired by other boys because he does not have to go to school or follow rules. He lives the way he wants to even though he is seen as an outcast in adult society. Huckleberry Finn becomes Tom Sawyer's partner in adventure, as he never has anywhere else to be.
Huckleberry Finn presents a contrast to a controlled society, which functions on rules and appearances. Finn is an innocent soul who is unsophisticated, but unashamed. He knows who he is and how he wants to live his life, which is why he cannot stand the formalities of life with the wealthy Widow Douglas at the end of the book. Huckleberry Finn's character shows that money and social conventions do not make people truly happy.
Aunt Polly
Aunt Polly is the guardian of Tom Sawyer and Sid. She is an emotional, elderly lady who loves her nephews very much. She is often torn between being infuriated with Sawyer and being too tender-hearted to properly punish him.
Aunt Polly sees Sid as the good child and Tom Sawyer as the troublemaker. She is greatly distressed each time Tom Sawyer goes missing but always forgives him upon his return. Aunt Polly is a character who presents the difficult balance between love and discipline.
Sid
Sid is Tom Sawyer's younger brother. In Aunt Polly's eyes, Sid can do no wrong. He is often concerned about his brother and tattletales when Tom comes home late or sneaks off.
Becky Thatcher
Becky Thatcher is the daughter of the town judge and Tom Sawyer's love interest. Due to his immaturity, Sawyer frequently plays games with her and hurts her feelings. However, when the two are stuck in the cave together for three days, she relies on Tom Sawyer, and he eventually gets them out.
Unlike Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher is concerned about upsetting her parents. She is a stereotypical sweet, pretty girl who cries when she is upset and naively falls for Sawyer's games and misadventures. She comforts him when he is upset and looks to him as her hero at the end of the book.
Injun Joe
Injun Joe is an Indigenous American man who is the villain of the story. He murders Doctor Robertson in the graveyard and blames Muff Potter without remorse. Injun Joe runs out the window when Sawyer testifies at the trial and reveals that he killed the doctor.
Injun Joe is known as a drunk and has been discriminated against and mistreated all of his life because of his race and ethnicity. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer hunt Injun Joe down to steal the treasure he has found. When he is ultimately found dead behind the locked cave door, Sawyer feels great pity for him, as he could personally understand the desperation of being stuck in the cave.
Joe Harper
Joe Harper is a neighborhood boy who runs away with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to live a life of crime. His mother gets angry with him for stealing the cream in the house and sends him away. Harper is a sensitive boy who quickly becomes homesick and misses his family. He is easily influenced by Sawyer, who convinces him not to return yet by making a plan for them to return and attend their own funerals.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Summary
Tom Sawyer is an orphan who lives with his Aunt Polly and his younger brother Sid in St. Petersburg, Missouri. He is always up to shenanigans. He skips school to go swimming and gets dirty wrestling with a neighborhood boy, which gets him in trouble with his aunt. She makes him whitewash the fence in the backyard on a Saturday as punishment, but he tricks other boys into doing it by convincing them it is a privilege to paint the fence.
A white picket fence is a symbol of ideal middle-class American life. Aunt Polly wants the house to look proper, but Tom Sawyer does not care about propriety. He wants to explore, play games, and have fun. He is not concerned about what society thinks of him, which Twain illuminates as a positive quality of boyhood.
Fig. 3 - Tom Sawyer gets all sorts of trinkets from the boys for the "privilege" of painting the fence. When it is all done properly, Aunt Polly is amazed.
Tom Sawyer goes to play battle with the other boys in town. He spots a girl next door (Becky Thatcher) whom he falls in love with and tries to show off for. When his efforts fail, he dramatically ponders the idea of death and lays beneath the window of the girl at night. A maid spots him and pours water on him out the window. He returns home wet and upset.
At breakfast the next morning, Tom struggles to recite scripture verses. His cousin Mary helps him and makes sure he gets clean and ready for church on Sunday. Tom gets easily bored and distracted in church, choosing to pay attention to a beetle that gets chased by a dog.
At Sunday school, Tom Sawyer takes the tickets he got from the boys he tricked into whitewashing the fence and trades them in for a Bible. Everyone thinks he has memorized 2,000 Bible verses in order to get the tickets.
How does Mark Twain characterize the children's and Tom Sawyer's view of God and religion?
On Monday, Tom Sayer arrives at school late, after stopping to talk to Huckleberry Finn about his graveyard expeditions. He gets lashed for being late but formally meets Becky Thatcher. The two meet after school and get "engaged" after kissing and saying they love one another. However, Becky Thatcher gets heartbroken upon finding that Tom Sawyer was previously engaged to another girl, Amy Lawrence.
Tom Sawyer sneaks out at night and goes to a graveyard with Huckleberry Finn. They witness Injun Joe and Muff Potter robbing a grave under the direction of Doctor Robinson. Injun Joe takes revenge on Doctor Robinson for treating him poorly in the past and stabs him with Muff Potter’s knife. Potter is drunk and gets knocked unconscious as the other two men fight. When Muff Potter awakes with Doctor Robinson’s blood all over him, Injun Joe convinces him that he killed the doctor.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn make a blood pact agreeing never to speak of the incident. When Sawyer and Finn return home, they see the townspeople, including Injun Joe, accusing the confused and apologetic Potter of killing Doctor Robinson. The boys feel terrible and become greatly dejected by the situation.
Sawyer is no longer his carefree self, despite his aunt’s efforts to prop him with medication and painkillers. He ultimately decides to run away for good, accompanied by Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain frequently uses hyperbole or over-exaggeration to create a humorous effect. Can you find an example of this in the text?
The boys take a raft to Jackson’s Island where they decide to live as pirates who engage in petty crime. They live freely on their own, indulging in their every whim and fancy. However, they all begin to get homesick deep down.
One night, Tom Sawyer takes a boat and returns home to find Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, and Joe Harper’s mother sadly sitting around a table. They reminisce about the boys and Sawyer hides as he listens to them talk. He discovers that they think the boys drowned in the Mississippi River.
Sawyer sneaks out and returns to the boys, who want to go back home. He entices them to stay with a secret plan that excites them. They brave a great storm on the island and covered in mud, they decide to be Indigenous Americans instead of pirates.
The secret plan is revealed as the boys return home to attend their own funeral, soaking in the scene of all the townspeople missing them. Aunt Polly makes Sawyer take accountability for lying, running away, and causing everyone great distress. He slowly begins to realize that his actions have an impact on others.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn bring Muff Potter tobacco and matches through the grates of his jail cell as his trial nears. The day before the trial, Sawyer tells Potter’s lawyer the truth about Injun Joe killing the doctor. Sawyer testifies at the trial and Injun Joe escapes out the window when his name is revealed.
Over summer vacation, the boys go to look for buried treasure. They end up at a haunted house where they overhear Injun Joe and another man. The men speak of a plot for revenge and find gold coins worth thousands of dollars beneath the floorboards of the house.
How would you describe the atmosphere or the mood when the boys initially enter the haunted house?
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn decide to track down the men for the treasure. At the climax of the book, Huckleberry Finn overhears the men speaking of torturing a lady named Widow Douglas. He alerts her Welsh neighbors to protect her. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher get stuck in McDougal’s cave for three days after venturing off on a trip that the townspeople took to visit the cave.
Fig. 4 - Tom Sawyer spots Injun Joe while he is in the cave, but he does not tell Becky because he does not want to frighten her.
The townspeople frantically search for the children and quickly assume they are dead. When the children enter town alive, there is a great celebration. Judge Thatcher declares that no one will ever get lost in the cave again because he has locked the entrance. Tom Sawyer announces that Injun Joe is still in the cave.
The townspeople go to find Injun Joe lying dead behind the door. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn go back to the cave themselves and enter through a secret hole to find Injun Joe’s treasure.
They find the gold coins hidden in the cave. On their way home, the Welshman picks them up and brings them to Widow Douglas’s house. A banquet of their friends and family awaits them. The widow gives the boys new suits to put on and announces that she will let Huckleberry Finn stay at her house and send him to school.
Tom Sawyer protests, saying that Huck Finn has his own money. He pours the gold coins out on the table and everyone is amazed. The money amounts to over $12,000. The boys end up getting a dollar a day, with the rest put into savings. The townspeople now adore them and hang onto every word they say. They miss the times when they were free and unnoticed.
Huckleberry Finn lives with the widow but runs away after a few weeks because he feels so constrained. She makes him dress and act formally, and he hates it. Tom Sawyer finds Finn and talks him into returning. He says that just because they are rich, it does not mean they cannot be robbers too. The boys plan an initiation ceremony for their gang of robbers to meet at midnight at the haunted house.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Themes
Although The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is primarily a children's book that explores themes of boyhood and adventure, it also frequently delves into dark, more adult themes such as death and sorrow. By exploring themes that deal with both the joys and sorrows of life, Mark Twain creates a story with many layers of meaning.
Death and Sorrow
The book very frequently points to the theme of death: Doctor Robinson is murdered, the town assumes Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Joe Harper drowned in the Mississippi River, the boys attend their own funeral, the town assumes Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher died in the cave, and in the end, Injun Joe is found lying dead in the cave.
Twain's exploration of death comes with both heavy and lightheartedness. The boys treat life with a fearless and careless sense of adventure, play, and fun. Death brings adult realities and serious evils of murder and hatred into their worlds. The townspeople's assumptions of the children's death present the human depths of despair and hopelessness.
The idea of sorrow is linked with the idea of death, but it also characterizes everyday life. Even the seemingly carefree Sawyer experiences moments of great sadness as he pines for girls' attention, contemplates death, and deals with being the witness of a misattributed murder.
When the three boys run away from home, they play games, hunt for food, steal, and do whatever they please. However, the striking feelings of homesickness frequently penetrate through their careless fun. Mark Twain presents sorrow as something that is inevitable, but also fleeting. One moment the boys are sad, distressed, and want to return home, and the next they are making a joke out of attending their own funerals. Twain characterizes human life accurately as a series of high and low feelings or grave and lighthearted events.
Boyhood and Adventure
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer presents the ideal of an adventurous boyhood in small-town America. Mark Twain paints boyhood as a unique period of freedom, exploration, and imagination. Twain immortalizes this image of rough-and-tumble boys who pretend to be pirates and enjoy nothing more than being free and outdoors.
Mark Twain also portrays boyhood as a time of freedom from society's conventions and fears. While the adults want everyone to act properly, the boys want to have fun and have no use for social conventions. They want to be outlaws, outcasts, and robbers because they sense that these are the types of people who really live exciting, adventurous lives. Even at the end of the book, when Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have riches and respect, they do not want to wear fancy clothes. They still want to be robbers and form a brotherhood of adventurers.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Famous Quotes
In Mark Twain's book, Tom Sawyer is a clever boy constantly trying to figure out how the world works. In the famous fence painting scene, Tom realizes that people want what they think they cannot have. This idea carries throughout the book as young schoolboys want to be pirates, robbers, and treasure hunters. What appears out of reach becomes most intriguing:
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 it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.” (Ch. 2)
Mark Twain uses the character Huckleberry Finn to show the disparity between the perception of children and adults. While the adults fear and criticize poor Huck Finn because he is a wandering vagabond, the boys admire his freedom and lack of care for fitting into the mold of society:
Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him." (Ch. 6)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Key takeaways
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a children's novel by Mark Twain that was published in 1876.
- The book is a bildungsroman, or coming of age story, set in the 1840s in a town called St. Petersburg in Hannibal, Missouri.
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
- The main characters of the book include Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Aunt Polly, Sid, Becky Thatcher, Injun Joe, and Joe Harper.
- The book explores themes of death, sorrow, adventure, and boyhood.
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Frequently Asked Questions about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
What is the main idea of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
The main idea of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is that boyhood is a time of great adventure. Mark Twain paints boyhood as a unique period of freedom, exploration, and imagination. Twain immortalizes this image of rough and tumble boys who pretend to be cowboys and pirates and enjoy nothing more than being free and outdoors.
What genre is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is part of the bildungsroman genre. A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the main character as they transition from childhood to adulthood. The growth and change of a character are essential to this genre.
What are the themes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
The themes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are death, sorrow, adventure, and boyhood.
Who is the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
Mark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
What is the climax of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?
The climax of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is when Huckleberry Finn overhears Injun Joe and his accomplice speaking of torturing Widow Douglas. He alerts her Welsh neighbors to protect her. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher get stuck in McDougal’s cave for three days after venturing off on a trip that the townspeople took to visit the cave.
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