Lee’s army surrenders, ending the Civil War. While prospecting for gold in Calaveras County, California, Twain hears a tale he uses for a story that makes him famous; originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” it is published in New York’s Saturday Press.

1866Twain travels to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union; upon his return to California, he delivers his first public lecture, beginning a successful career as a humorous speaker.
1867Twain travels to New York, and then to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamer Quaker City; during five months abroad, he contributes to California’s largest paper, Sacramento’s Alta California, and writes several letters for the New York Tri bune. He publishes a volume of stories and sketches, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches.
1868Twain meets and falls in love with Olivia (Livy) Langdon. His overseas writings have increased his popularity; he signs his first book contract and begins The Innocents Abroad, sketches based on his trip to the Holy Land. He embarks on a lecture tour of the American Midwest.
1869Twain becomes engaged to Livy, who acts as his editor from that time on. The Innocents Abroad, published as a subscription book, is an instant success, selling nearly 100,000 copies in the first three years.
1870Twain and Livy marry. Their son, Langdon, is born; he lives only two years.
1871The Clemens move to Hartford, Connecticut.
1872Roughing It, an account of Twain’s adventures out West, is pub lished to enormous success. The first of Twain’s three daughters, Susy, is born. Twain strikes up a lifelong friendship with the writer William Dean Howells.
1873Ever the entrepreneur, Twain receives the patent for Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook, an invention that is a commercial success. He publishes The Gilded Age, a collaboration with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes the post-Civil War era.
1874His daughter Clara is born. The family moves into a mansion in Hartford in which they will live for the next seventeen years.
1876The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is published.
1877Twain collaborates with Bret Harte—an author known for his use of local color and humor and for his parodies of Cooper, Dickens, and Hugo—to produce the play Ah Sin.
1880Twain invests in the Paige typesetter and loses thousands of dol lars. He publishes A Tramp Abroad, an account of his travels in Europe the two previous years. His daughter Jean is born.
1881The Prince and the Pauper, Twain’s first historical romance, is pub lished.
1882Twain plans to write about the Mississippi River and makes the trip from New Orleans to Minnesota to refresh his memory.
1883The nonfiction work Life on the Mississippi is published.
1884Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book Twain worked on for nearly ten years, is published in England; publication in the United States is delayed until the following year because an illustration plate is judged to be obscene.
1885When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in America—by Twain’s ill-fated publishing house, run by his nephew Charles Webster—controversy immediately surrounds the book. Twain also publishes the memoirs of his friend former President Ulysses S. Grant.
1888He receives an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University.
1889He publishes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the first of his major works to be informed by a deep pessimism. He meets Rudyard Kipling, who had come to America to meet Twain, in Livy’s hometown of Elmira, New York.
1890Twain’s mother dies.
1891Financial difficulties force the Clemens family to close their Hart ford mansion; they move to Berlin, Germany.
1894Twain publishes The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, a dark novel about the aftermath of slavery, which sells well, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, which does not. Twain’s publishing company fails and leaves him bankrupt.
1895Twain embarks on an ambitious worldwide lecture tour to restore his financial position.
1896He publishes Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Tom Sawyer, Detective. His daughter Susy dies of spinal meningitis.
1901Twain is awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Yale.
1902Livy falls gravely ill. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a stage adap tation of the novel, opens to favorable reviews. Though he is credited with coauthorship, Twain has little to do with the play and never sees it performed. He receives an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Missouri.
1903Hoping to restore Livy’s health, Twain takes her to Florence, Italy.
1904Livy dies, leaving Twain devastated. He begins dictating an un even autobiography that he never finishes.
1905Theodore Roosevelt invites Twain to the White House. Twain enjoys a gala celebrating his seventieth birthday in New York. He continues to lecture, and he addresses Congress on copyright is sues.
1906Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine moves in with the fam ily.
1907Twain travels to Oxford University to receive an honorary Doc tor of Letters degree.
1908He settles in Redding, Connecticut, at Stormfield, the mansion that is his final home.
1909Twain’s daughter Clara marries; the author dons his Oxford robe for the ceremony. His daughter Jean dies.
1910Twain travels to Bermuda for his health. He develops heart prob lems and, upon his return to Stormfield, dies, leaving behind a cache of unpublished work.

INTRODUCTION

005

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain’s “other” book, the one, it is said, that prepared the way for his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in which the hero of that work was born as a secondary figure. There is much truth in this formulation. Huck Finn is indeed Twain’s masterpiece, perhaps his only great novel. In directly engaging slavery, it far surpasses the moral depth of Tom Sawyer, and its brilliant first-person narration as well as its journey structure elevate it stylisti cally above the somewhat fragmentary and anecdotal Tom Sawyer. Yet it is important to understand Tom Sawyer in its own terms, and not just as a run-up to Huck Finn. It was, after all, Mark Twain’s best-selling novel during much of the twentieth century; and it has always had a vast international following. People who have never actually read the novel know its memorable episodes, such as the fence whitewashing scene, and its characters—Tom foremost among them—who have entered into national folklore. The appeal of Tom Sawyer is enduring, and it will be our purpose here to try to locate some of the sources of that appeal.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain’s first novel (the first he authored by himself),1 but it is hardly the work of an apprentice writer.