Tom Sawyer and Pudd'nbead Wilson excepted, Samuel Clemens's best work is written in the autobiographical first-person form. As we see in Innocents Abroad, his first encounter with the Old World, and Roughing It, his evocation of the American West, he created in Mark Twain an authorial self who was also a performing self within the narratives. Both are journey books in which Twain takes the episodes as they come, and in which nothing conclusive is promised or achieved. Each is the sum of its mainly comical adventures, though each also has an intermittently desolating undercurrent which will rise irresistibly to the surface in such final works as 'The Mysterious Stranger' . Huckleberry Finn develops their method with Huck, ostensibly the creation of Twain, now at an even further remove from Clemens.

Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer, eventually escaping and finding the treasure that Joe had buried.Huckleberry Finn recounts the further adventures of Huck, who runs away from a drunken and brutal father, and meets up with the escaped slave Jim. They float down the Mississippi on a raft,participating in the lives of the characters they meet, witnessing corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment.Sharing so much in background and character, these two stories,the best of Twain, indisputably belong together in one volume.Though originally written as adventure stories for young people,the vivid writing provides a profound commentary on provincial American life in the mid- 19th century and the institution of slavery.

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

NOTES