The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is one of the most famous books in American Literature and its hero has gone down in history as the very type of all-American bad-boy with a good heart. The novel is in many ways a rebuttal to the educational boys’ stories Twain read as a child in Sunday school and of which he had written similar but shorter parodies during his days as a journalist in the West. These stories include “The Story of a Bad Little Boy Who Lived a Charmed Life” (1865) and “The Story of a Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” (1870), but the actual seed for Tom Sawyer was “A Boy’s Manuscript” (1868) which tells in diary form the antics of Billy Rogers and his

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Published 21 October 2009

Citation: Loges, Max Lester. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 October 2009.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1649, accessed 21 November 2009.]