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Summary
Summary
As part of the wonderful Collector's Library series, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of the best-loved children's classics of all time. This attractive volume contains the complete and unabridged story with 8 full color illustrations, plus numerous black & white illustrations throughout. The deluxe edition features a full piece cloth case, a four color illustrated onlay on the front cover, foil stamping on front and spine, stained edges on three sides, printed endpapers with book plate and a satin ribbon marker. This book should have an honored place in any child's library.
Author Notes
Mark Twain was born Samuel L. Clemens in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. He worked as a printer, and then became a steamboat pilot. He traveled throughout the West, writing humorous sketches for newspapers. In 1865, he wrote the short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which was very well received. He then began a career as a humorous travel writer and lecturer, publishing The Innocents Abroad in 1869, Roughing It in 1872, and, Gilded Age in 1873, which was co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mississippi Writing: Life on the Mississippi, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Horn Book Review
These adaptations are so poor that it is a disgrace for the original author's name to appear on the book; the old classic comic-book renditions had more integrity. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
The fourth entry in Papercutz' Classics Illustrated Deluxe line of graphic-novel adaptations reworks Twain's classic tale of jubilant delinquency in a full-color manga style. The boy's manic irrepressibility is a neat fit for the flitting quality of the anime-inspired artwork, and the signature fence-whitewashing scene is especially well handled. While the hoary dialogue at first seems at odds with the modern manga format, it soon settles into a nice rhythm that preserves much of the Twainian flavor. The lengthy adaptation is doggedly faithful, with little missing from the twists, turns, and digressions of the original.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"IT WAS AS though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short." Those lines are from Evelyn Waugh's novel "Brideshead Revisited." They came to me as I switched off the 2016 presidential campaign and listened to Nick Offerman's audiobook narration of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." What a tonic those eight hours were! Offerman's Illinois-raised voice and actor's talent suit him ideally to channel Mark Twain and his archetypal American Puck (that "P" isn't a typo), who played pirates with an archetypal American Huck, conned his pals into whitewashing the fence, fell in love with Becky Thatcher and showed up alive at his own funeral. Was it as satisfying as it was because of all the political screeching in the background? No. Listening to Offerman's "Tom Sawyer" would be ear balm anytime. Perhaps the reason is that this is a novel many of us first heard before we read it. "Tom Sawyer" and its sequel, "Huckleberry Finn," are arguably America's ur-bedtime stories. This may not be true for the millennial gen raised on apps and Twitter, but it was for mine and generations going back to Ulysses S. Grant's presidency. Listening to Tom's adventures over - gasp - a half-century after I last did sent me back to a time when early evenings found me sipping hot cocoa instead of vodka-and-tonics. In the preface to the novel, Twain tells us, "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." Hmm. Actually, Mr. Clemens is being a tad cagey with us. (Surprise!) On July 5, 1875, he wrote his friend William Dean Howells. the great editor and "Dean of American Letters" of the day: "I have finished the story & didn't take the chap beyond boyhood. . . . If I went on, now, & took him into manhood, he would just be like all the one-horse men in literature & the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy's book, at all. It will only be read by adults." On reading the manuscript, Howells wrote back: "It is altogether the best boy's story I ever read. It will be an immense success. But I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do." In his afterword to the Oxford Mark Twain edition, the critic Albert Stone provides a tantalizing, and somewhat pause-giving, asterisk: Before Howells read the manuscript, Twain wrote and asked him to collaborate with him on a stage version: "I have my eye upon two young girls who can play 'Tom' and 'Huck.'" As Aunt Polly might say, "Laws!" Twain was conflicted about his novel in another way. In that July 5 letter to Howells, he says, "I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person." Nine years later, Twain would publish a novel that begins, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter." If it was timely to have this audio version amid an especially choleric and noisy election cycle, writing "Tom Sawyer" must have been a tonic for its author as well. It's the first novel Twain wrote entirely by himself. He probably began writing it in 1873. the year he and his co-author, Charles Dudley Warner, published "The Gilded Age," their novel of Reconstruction-era corruption and greed. What could be more cleansing, after literary immersion in the seamy and squalid arena of robber-baron America, than an adventure story about an idyllic boyhood on the Mississippi River? This book, he said, was "simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." The operative word there is "worldly." Tom's idyllic boyhood witnessed grave robbing and murder. One of his pals was the homeless son of the town drunk; another character is a child slave named Jim. Nostalgia can be a mixed bag. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of the Oxford Mark Twain collection, points out that Twain "understood the nostalgia for a 'simpler' past that increased as that past receded - and he saw through the nostalgia to a past that was just as complex as the present. He recognized better than we did ourselves our potential for greatness and our potential for disaster." Decades later, Twain would call President Teddy Roosevelt "the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the 20th century." This was not intended as a compliment. As the incessantly cited line by Hemingway goes, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'" Does it? "Huckleberry Finn" sold more copies than "Tom Sawyer" during Twain's lifetime. (Twain was overjoyed when it was banned by the Concord Library, estimating that censorship would sell an additional 25,000 copies.) But in the 20th century, "Tom Sawyer" reigned as the top best seller of all Twain's novels. Twain scholars themselves cannot explain this, so I sure won't try to, beyond recording my pleasure in listening to Nick Offerman read it to me anew over the course of eight happy hours. He makes it sound easy. It can't have been. This is one of the first novels to capture - indeed, define - the American vernacular. Try these lines on your tongue, see how they roll out: "'Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would.' "'She! She never licks anybody - whacks 'em over the head with her thimble - and who cares for that, I'd like to know. She talks awful, but talk don't hurt - anyways it don't if she don't cry. Jim, I'll give you a marvel. I'll give you a white alley!' "Jim began to waver. "'White alley, Jim! And it's a bully taw.'" How's your tongue doing? In Chapter 5, the minister of the village church gives out the hymn, which he does "with a relish": "At church 'sociables' he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and 'wall' their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, 'Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth.'" The minister, Twain tells us, "was regarded as a wonderful reader." So he was; so he is, 140 years later. 'Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women.' CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY'S latest novel, "The Relic Master," is now out in paperback.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-These abridged versions of classic novels are designed to present the works for young readers, using an interesting format. Unfortunately, both books fall short of this goal. Instead of relating interesting stories, Kirwan simply tells readers what happened in short, choppy sentences. There is little dialogue among characters, and students will have a hard time understanding Jim's poorly written dialect. For instance, in Huckleberry Finn, he states, "'Nemmine 'bout a doctor.'" An error is evident in the same book when Jim describes the dead man in the timber house, telling Huck "He's dead-ben shot" and the illustration depicts a stabbing victim. Some paragraphs are so long that they take up an entire page, and indenting their first lines doesn't seem to be a rule. Poor writing, sketchy illustrations, and bad formatting will not inspire kids to read the original books. Notes at the end, which include a "Filling in the Spaces" section and character descriptions, are weak attempts to provide useful information.-Cheryl Ashton, Amherst Public Library, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From H. Daniel Peck's Introduction to Adventures of Tom Sawyer 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 stylistically 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), but it is hardly the work of an apprentice writer. By the time this book was published in 1876, Samuel L. Clemens was already well known by his pen name Mark Twain, which he had adopted in 1863 while working as a reporter in Nevada. At the time of the novel's publication, he was in his early forties and beginning to live in an architect-designed home in Hartford, Connecticut. He had been married to his wife, Olivia, for six years, and two of his three daughters had been born. Up to this point, Twain had been known as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. His story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," first published in 1865, had made him famous, and the lecture tours he had given in the United States and England in these years had been well received. His books The Innocents Abroad (1869), which satirizes an American sightseeing tour of the Middle East that he covered for a newspaper, and Roughing It (1872), an account of the far west based on his own experiences there, were great successes. Both works were first published in subscription form, and they quickly advanced Twain's reputation as a popular writer. His publication in 1873 of The Gilded Age , a book coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner dramatizing the excesses of the post-Civil War period, confirmed his place as a leading social critic. Indeed, the America reflected in The Gilded Age --an America of greed, corruption, and materialism--may have driven Twain back imaginatively to what seemed to him a simpler time--to "those old simple days", as he refers to them in the concluding chapter of Tom Sawyer . The first significant sign of such a return in his publications was his nostalgic essay "Old Times on the Mississippi," which appeared in 1875.3 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , published the following year, belongs to this return to antebellum America, and to the scene of Twain's growing up--Hannibal, Missouri. That the author was able to draw upon his deepest reserves of childhood imagination in this work certainly accounts for much of its appeal. A decade after its publication, he referred to the novel as a "hymn" to a forgotten era,4 and while this characterization oversimplifies The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , it also points to key aspects of its composition and literary character. In the novel, Twain renames Hannibal as St. Petersburg, thus suggesting, as John C. Gerber has said, St. Peter's place, or heaven.5 But heaven, as Twain depicts it, is a real place. Many of the sites and topographical features are identifiable. Cardiff Hill, so important in the novel as a setting for children's games such as Robin Hood, is Holliday's Hill of Hannibal. Jackson's Island, the scene of the boys' life as "pirates," is recognizable as Glasscock's Island. And McDougal's Cave, so central to the closing movement of the novel, has a real-life reference in McDowell's cave. Human structures, like Aunt Polly's house, as well as the schoolhouse and the church, were similarly modeled after identifiable buildings in Hannibal. The autobiographical origins of the novel are also evident in the characters. In the preface, Twain says that "Huck Finn is drawn from life" (in part from a childhood friend named Tom Blankenship), and "Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew." Schoolmates John Briggs and Will Bowen probably were two of the three boys after whom Tom was modeled, and a good bet for the third is young Sam Clemens himself. Many of Tom's qualities resemble Twain's descriptions of his young self, and several of Tom's experiences--such as being forced by Aunt Polly to take the Painkiller and sitz baths--reflect the author's own. Aunt Polly herself has several characteristics that link her to Sam Clemens's mother, Jane Clemens. And scholars have found Hannibal counterparts for many of the other characters, including Becky Thatcher, Joe Harper, and Ben Rogers, as well as the widow Douglas and the town's minister, schoolteacher, and doctor. Excerpted from Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
