 Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky in Injun Joe's cave. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn book cover The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a very well-known and popular story concerning American youth. Mark Twain's lively tale of the scrapes and adventures of boyhood is set in St. Petersburg, Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of adventures many boys can imagine: racing bugs during class, impressing girls, i.e. Becky Thatcher, with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi river.
One of the most famous incidents in the book describes how Tom persuades his friends to do a boring, hateful chore for him: whitewashing (i.e., painting) a fence.
Tom Sawyer also appears in three other Mark Twain books Tom Sawyer, Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Of the books, Huck Finn is considered by far to have the most literary merit, with Tom Sawyer being more of a youth-oriented adventure story.
The story of Tom Sawyer has been made into a motion picture several times, from the first in 1917 starring Jack Pickford as Tom to Disney's 1995 Tom and Huck. In the 2003 film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom is added as an adult secret agent, possibly to augment the British cast with an American character.
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