Mark Twain

Mark Twain is one of the great American novelists, who, with the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, wrote one of the Great American Novels.

Works of interest

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer August 2014 (see below)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

  of which the Author stated: I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none.

• Extracts from Adam's Diary and Eve's Diary 2005.
• The Awful German Language.
• Life on the Mississippi (if we ever go there).

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

This is the beginning of the series, although the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the immediate sequel) are regarded as the masterpiece. Already in this first opus, Huck appears as a more interesting character than Tom, who is the leader, but also the privileged one.

The novel is sometimes classified as a Bildungsroman, which is wrong, particularly in the light of the Author's conclusion:

It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.

Instead, it is really a novel celebrating childhood.