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Mischief is Tom Sawyer's middle name. There's nothing he likes better than playing hookey from school, messing about on the Mississippi with his best friend, the hobo Huckleberry Finn, or wooing the elusive beauty Becky Thatcher. Lazy & reckless, he's a menace to his Aunt Polly--'Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive'--an embarrassment to teachers, the envy of peers. But there's method in his b... More

Mischief is Tom Sawyer's middle name. There's nothing he likes better than playing hookey from school, messing about on the Mississippi with his best friend, the hobo Huckleberry Finn, or wooing the elusive beauty Becky Thatcher. Lazy & reckless, he's a menace to his Aunt Polly--'Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive'--an embarrassment to teachers, the envy of peers. But there's method in his badness. He exhibits all the cunning of a magpie when hatching an elaborate scheme to avoid whitewashing a fence, & an adventure downriver with Huck & Joe Harper plunges the hamlet of St Petersburg into such an outpouring of grief that Tom is spared the belt on his return. But the innocent adventures end when Tom & Huck witness a graveyard murder. Should they report what they saw in the moonlight, when Injun Joe slipped the bloodstained knife into the hands of Muff Potter or should they be mum & risk letting an innocent man be executed?
'Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest of those boys who were schoolmates of mine', Mark Twain wrote in the preface to the original 1876 edition. Inspired by his upbringing in a small township on the Mississippi, & written 'to remind adults of what they once were themselves, & of how they felt & thought & talked, & what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in', Twain's hymn to childhood & the outdoors remains a classic account of boys on the loose in frontier-era America.

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