The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Few books capture both the simplicity and complexities of American life quite like these enduring "boyhood" classics by Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Take a lighthearted, nostalgic trip to a simpler time, seen through the eyes of a special boy named Tom Sawyer. It is a summertime world of hooky and adventure, pranks and punishment, villains and young love. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn He has no mother, his father is a drunkard, and he sleeps in a barrel. He's Huck Finn-liar, sometime thief, and rebel against respectability. But when Huck meets a runaway slave named Jim, his life changes forever. And on a raft floating down the Mississippi, the boy nobody wanted matures into a young man of courage and conviction. Now includes a new introduction.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made a fortune from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental-and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature." Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, is Chair of the Department of American Studies and Professor of American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author, most recently, of Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, and also of the award-winning books Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices and From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. She edited the twenty-nine volume Oxford Mark Twain and has served as President of the Mark Twain Circle of America.