The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Signet Classics)

by Mark Twain

mass market paperback, 486 pages

English language

Published May 1, 1979 by Signet Classics.

ISBN:: 978-0-451-52272-6
OCLC Number:: 26648624

(12 reviews)

ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER Here is a light-hearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return to the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer, his Aunt Polly, and his friends Huck Finn and Becky. It is a dreamlike world of summertime and hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a very special boy. For adults it re-creates the vanished dreams of youth. For younger readers it unveils the boundaries of tantalizing horizons still to come. And for everyone, it reveals the heart and mind of one of America's greatly loved writers.

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN He has no mother, his father is a brutal drunkard, and he sleeps in a hogshead. He's Huck Finn, a homeless waif, a liar and thief on occasion, and a casual rebel against respectability. But on the day that he encounters a runaway slave named Jim, Huck also finds love, acceptance, and responsibility. And it is during the course of the exciting and moving story of these two outcasts fleeing down the Mississippi on a raft that the boy nobody wants becomes a human being with a sense of his own destiny and the courage to choose between the conventional world and the person who needs him the most. As Ernest Hemingway said of this glorious novel: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

With an Introduction by James Dickey.

60 editions

Jonathan Arnold reviewed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Review of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Yeah, so I'm a little late to this classic tale of Americana by Mark Twain. Better late than never, right?

It was a fun listen. The narrator, Grover Gardner, did a good job with the reading, the voices and the words. There were definitely some pretty funny moments and some touching moments and even some tense moments. I particularly liked Twain's sardonic side comments on people and their beliefs, like the part where he describes the reading of the essays and just how blandly awful they generally are, but that's what the people liked, so that's what the people got.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were interesting characters, with plenty of insights of their own. They had plenty of adventures that brought me back to my days as a kid. I really enjoyed Tom Sawyer's interpretations of certain classes of characters in book, like thieves and pirates. They were always just so wrong and yet, somehow, just so right!

Admittedly, the casual racism and misogyny were a little hard to take, even if Twain himself seemed to recognize it in the book. I've never been a big fan of "coming of age" books, but this did a pretty good job of weaving an interesting story bigger than that simple thread. Glad I "read" it and am already looking forward to the sequel.