The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The mischievous boy Tom Sawyer roams a sleepy Mississippi river town through a summer of whitewashed fences, pirate games, buried treasure and a murder witnessed at midnight. Twain drew St Petersburg from his own Hannibal, Missouri, and maps its real world: the village and Aunt Polly's, the graveyard and the schoolhouse, Jackson's Island where the boys run wild, and the cave where Tom and Becky are lost and Injun Joe meets his end.

Tom

Aunt Polly's

The whitewashed fence

In the drowsy river town, Tom dodges chores and school, and famously tricks the other boys into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence. Twain opens on the small comedy of boyhood in a Mississippi village, the sunlit ordinary world whose peace a midnight crime is about to disturb.

The opening chapters

inspired by Tom's home with Aunt Polly in the village of St Petersburg is drawn from Twain's own Hannibal, Missouri; sited there.

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