The adventures of Tom Sawyer

Hartford: The American Publishing Co, 1876. FIRST EDITION. Wood-engraved frontispiece and half title printed on separate leaves, and numerous wood engravings by True Williams and others. An excellent, near-perfect copy in the original decorated publisher’s cloth, and preserved in a folding half-morocco clamshell case. First printing, first issue, with all issue points noted. Featuring one of the best-loved characters in American fiction, we join Tom with his well-known incidents of the whitewashed fence, his love affair with Becky Thatcher, and the trial of Injun Joe, all evocative of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain spent his youth. A somber undercurrent is threaded through the high humor and brazen nostalgia of the story, which highlights the dichotomy of the innocence of childhood and the inequities of the realities of adulthood in this Midwestern town: base emotions and fallacies, murder and retribution, starvation and slavery. The adventures of Tom Sawyer was continually adapted for film and television.

Lauded as the “Father of American Literature,” Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his most-used pen name, Mark Twain, is a hallmark of classic American literature. Known for his famous work, The adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain is known for his radical civil rights views and often-censored subject matter. His works run the gamut from novels, to collections of letters, to humorous stories about nineteenth century steamboat culture.