The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Rated among the great works of American fiction, Twain’s classics paint an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, and combine picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great technical innovative power.It is really a great fun to look back at our own childhood as we relive Tom’s romantic exploits through his eyes and our own in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom, an universally recognisable classic literary hero, is an intelligent and imaginative boy who is nevertheless careless and mischievous. He along with his friend Huck Finn accidently witnesses a murder for which an innocent man is wrongly accused. Together they succeed in revealing the truth, but now the real murderer is after their life. From the famous episodes of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the hunt for the treasure that Joe had buried, the novel is simply superb, readable and full of surprises.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a brilliant satire on racism, giving a taste of American life in the late 19th century, is equally interesting. Tired of the endless constraints of the so-called “civilized society”, Huck teams with runaway slave Jim. As they ride their raft down the current, they encounter many challenges. Having been taught that helping a Black, runaway slave is a sin unimaginable, Huck faces a harrowing choice between the social norm and the person who needs him the most. Owing to its wonderful story, filled with plenty of action, youthful innocence and backwoods charm, and twists and turns in the plot, reader won’t be able to put this book down before its completion. About Author: Mark Twain, the pen-name for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835. He moved with his family to the Mississippi River town of Hannibal when he was four years old. Later he made the scenes of his youth internationally famous in his most popular novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He left school at the age of twelve, and later travelled throughout the East and Midwest as a journeyman printer. From 1857 to 1861 he was a pilot on the great river Mississippi. He served briefly in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, but his Division deserted and he spent the remainder of the war out West, some of it prospecting for silver in Nevada with his brother Orion, and then working with Bret Harte as a journalist in San Francisco. In 1863 he began using the name Mark Twain, and in 1865 made it famous with his story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He quickly established his reputation as one of the best of the South-western humorists.Clemens moved to New York in 1867 and from that time made the East Coast and Europe his home. Within three years he was called “The People’s Author”; he established himself as one of the most popular platform performers of his time. He met and married Olivia Langdon, daughter of a rich and socially prominent New York family.Clemens’ second book, Innocents Abroad, based on a trip to Holy Land he took with a group of American tourists, was published in 1869 and was a great success. In the years immediately following he published Roughing It (1872), his first novel The Gilded Age (a collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner 1873), Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).During this period his family grew—a son, Langdon (1870), who lived only nineteen months, and three daughters, Susy (1872), Clara (1874), and Jean (1880)—and his life style became increasingly expensive. In 1871 he built a huge mansion at “Nook Farm” in Hartford, Connecticut. This “dream house” and ultimate sign of success became one of the biggest financial burdens for Clemens during the last half of his career. Operating, redecorating, and entertaining at the Nook Farm estate became so expensive and time consuming that, to reduce expenditure, Clemens ultimately packed the family up and fled to Europe for several years.While the 1880s represented the artistic and personal bests of Clemens’ career and life, the 1890s were the worst. Never satisfied being just a world famous writer, platform entertainer, and celebrity, in order to make money, Clemens decided to enter business by setting up a publishing company and installing an automated mechanical typesetting machine. Unfortunately both his big business ventures failed and in 1893, he went into personal bankruptcy. On August 18, 1896, an even more unfortunate event took place in the sudden death of his twentyfour years old daughter Susy.Time somewhat soothed the pain of his daughter’s death and, with the help of Standard Oil tycoon H.H. Rogers, Clemens wrote, lectured and got out of bankruptcy but became increasingly alienated from the good-humoured wit on which his popularity was based. His writings became increasingly bitter over the last two decades of his life. Severe pessimism and dissatisfaction reflected in his books The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) and What Is Man? (1906) as well as in much of his posthumously published work.His wife died in 1904 and his second daughter in 1909. While his personal life was devastated, his professional life carried him through. He continued to lecture widely, in the U.S.A. and abroad, though his opinions were often controversial. He was extremely proud of the honorary doctorate of letters awarded to him by Oxford University in 1907. He died in 1910 leaving a wealth of unpublished material, which included The Mysterious Stranger (1916) and Letters From the Earth (1962). His Autobiography was published in 1924.