" It's altogether the best boy's story I ever read ", novelist William Dean Howells wrote to his friend Mark Twain. " It will be an immense success. " Of course he was right. Generations have relished wily Tom Sawyer's solution to the problem of how to whitewash a fence. From schoolroom to church, from graveyard to cave, they have envied the vivid childhood of a scamp in provincial St. Petersburg. " I wish I had been on that island ", wrote Howells, recalling just one of the redoubtable Tom's adventures ; and who would even think of disagreeing ? From young love to young fear, Tom runs the gamut of childhood experience for us all. Mark Twain went on to devote a substantial fiction to Tom's friend Huckleberry Finn (whose adventures are also available in Könemann Classics), but this was the book that went straight to the heart of the child in every one of us.
" It's altogether the best boy's story I ever read ", novelist William Dean Howells wrote to his friend Mark Twain. " It will be an immense success. " Of course he was right. Generations have relished wily Tom Sawyer's solution to the problem of how to whitewash a fence. From schoolroom to church, from graveyard to cave, they have envied the vivid childhood of a scamp in provincial St. Petersburg. " I wish I had been on that island ", wrote Howells, recalling just one of the redoubtable Tom's adventures ; and who would even think of disagreeing ? From young love to young fear, Tom runs the gamut of childhood experience for us all. Mark Twain went on to devote a substantial fiction to Tom's friend Huckleberry Finn (whose adventures are also available in Könemann Classics), but this was the book that went straight to the heart of the child in every one of us.
