The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Signet Classics)

Author: Twain, Mark

Brand: Signet

Color: Multicolor

Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Number Of Pages: 256

Release Date: 06-05-2008

Part Number: 43192-571486

Details: Product Description


The classic adventures of one of American literature’s most beloved characters from Mark Twain, one of America’s best-loved writers.

Here is a lighthearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return into the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, and Aunt Polly. It is a universal world of attending school and playing hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a boy who might be the young Mark Twain himself.

There is sheer delight in
Tom Sawyer—even in the darkest moments, affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it re-creates the vanished dreams of youth. For younger readers it unveils the boundaries of tantalizing horizons still to come. And for everyone, it reveals the mind and heart of one of America’s best-loved writers.


With an Introduction by Robert Tilton

and an Afterword by Geoffrey Sanborn


About the Author


In his person and in his pursuits, 
Mark Twain (1835-1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."


Robert Tilton is a Associate Professor of English and Department Head at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of
Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative and co-author of
Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend,
George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths,
Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal, and
Lee and Grant, and has written the Introduction to the Signet Classics edition of Cooper's
The Deerslayer.  


Geoffrey Sanborn, Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, is the author of
The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader,
Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans,
Moby-Dick, and the Maori, and
Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


Chapter 1

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them, about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service;-she could have seen through a pair of stove lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll-"

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom-and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

"I never did see the beat of that boy!"

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice, at an angle calculated for distance, and shouted:

"Y-o-u-u Tom!"

There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.

"There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What is that truck?"

"I don't know, aunt."

"We

EAN: 9780451530936

Package Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches

Languages: English