The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Clydesdale Classics)

Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential works. From the musings of literary geniuses such as Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our literary history through the words of the exceptional few.

One of Mark Twain's most beloved and respected novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer presents a tale of two young boys, their antics and adventures in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Tom, a young boy with a knack for getting into trouble, finds himself and best friend Huck Finn at the center of a very diabolical situation. One night, while Tom and Huck Finn are in a graveyard, they witness a murder. Terrified, they flee from the spot and swear that they will never reveal their secret to anyone. This sets off a chain of events in which Tom and Huck find themselves entangled, with dangerous men in pursuit to track them down.

Timeless and read by generation after generation, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of Twain's finest novels. Rediscover the adventure with this edition. Read more Continue reading Read less AMAZON.COM REVIEW
A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. --This text refers to an alternate kindleedition edition. FROM AUDIOFILE
Tom's adventures continue to be engaging, funny, innocent, and insightful all at the same time, and are full of great characters living their nineteenth-century lives with all of America's confidence and wide-open possibilities. I wish I could report to you that William Dufris, usually a very reliable narrator, is up to the task, but alas, I cannot. Dufris adopts a homey, meandering voice that mostly sounds tentative and doesn't match Twain's energy. He tries to liven up a bit during dialogue scenes, but the character voices he uses for Tom and Huck don't have much depth. This is a serviceable version of the book, and if you haven't read it in a while, it's worth a listen. But it's not the classic version it could be. R.I.G. AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindleedition edition. EXCERPT. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Chapter 1

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them, about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service;-she could have seen through a pair of stove lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll-"

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom-and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

"I never did see the beat of that boy!"

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice, at an angle calculated for distance, and shouted:

"Y-o-u-u Tom!"

There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.

"There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What is that truck?"

"I don't know, aunt."

"Well I know. It's jam-that's what it is. Forty times I've said if you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch."

The switch hovered in the air-the peril was desperate-

"My! Look behind you, aunt!"

The old lady whirled around, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled, on the instant, scrambled up the high board fence, and disappeared over it.

His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh.

"Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him

by this time? But old fools is

the biggest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down again and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a-laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Well-a-well