The first full-scale novel he had completed, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (though it was not enthusiastically received when first published in 1876) brought him into the company of writers like his friend William Dean Howells. In this work, Twain demonstrated his capacity to weave the longer tapestries of fiction, and to elaborate them with his richest materials of memory, humor, and social criticism. Though an immature and experimental work, flawed by divided purposes, Tom Sawyer nevertheless contains all the elements of the writer’s genius. Generations of readers have been content to ignore the flaws, and have given over their imaginations to Mark Twain’s “hymn” to childhood.

 

H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College, where he has served as Director of the American Culture Program and the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of Thoreau‘s Morning Work (1990) and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (1977), both published by Yale University Press. Professor Peck is the editor of the The Green American Tradition (1989) and New Essays on “The Last of the Mohicans” (1993), as well as the Penguin Classics editions A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851 and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He is also editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cooper’s The Deerslayer. A past chairman of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Professor Peck is a contributor to the Columbia Literary History of the United States and the Heath Anthology of American Literature. He has been the recipient of two senior research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. For the National Endowment, he has directed two Summer Institutes for College and University Faculty, and a national conference on “American Studies and the Undergraduate Humanities Curriculum.” Recently he was a fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was working on a developing study of landscape in American literary and visual art. Professor Peck lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with his wife Patricia B. Wallace.

 

Acknowledgments. Professor Peck’s research assistant, Matthew Saks, who graduated from Vassar College in 2003 as recipient of the Alice D. Snyder Prize for overall excellence in English, assisted in developing the explanatory notes for this volume; he also helped Professor Peck think through the issues raised in the introduction. Patricia B. Wallace, Professor of English at Vassar College, provided an illuminating and extremely helpful reading of the introduction.

Notes to the Introduction

1 Twain had earlier coauthored, with Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (1873), a fictional social critique of the post-Civil War era in America.

2 Twain’s Hartford home, which he moved into in 1874 when the structure was still unfinished, was designed by Edward T. Potter. Twain and his family lived in this house from this point until 1891. His marriage to Olivia Langdon, of Elmira, New York, took place in 1870, and his daughters Susy and Clara were born, respectively, in 1872 and 1874.

3 This work was later included in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883).

4 In a letter of 1887, Twain wrote, “Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air” (Mark Twain’s Letters, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), p. 477.

5 “Foreword” to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. xiii. This authoritative scholarly edition of the novel contains important information about its composition, and has explanatory notes that were useful in developing the notes for this volume.

6 The word “harvested” is Matthews‘s, but it appears to describe accurately the process that Twain was recounting to him. See Brander Matthews, The Tocsin of Revolt and Other Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), p. 265. In 1870, just after Twain’s marriage, he had an exchange of letters with a childhood friend, Will Bowen, to whom he wrote: “The fountains of my great deep are broken up & I have rained reminiscences for four & twenty hours.” Many of these “reminiscences,” as Charles A. Norton has pointed out, can be found reconfigured as episodes of Tom Sawyer, and they clearly were a generative force in the novel’s composition. See Charles A. Norton, Writing “Tom Sawyer”: The Adventures of a Classic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983), pp. 49-51.

7 Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872-1910, 2 vols., edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol.