The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain

1835-1910

The aurhor spent his childhood in a little town next to the river Mississippi, and he left school when he was 12 years old. He was a typographer, a steamboat pilot, and a gold digger, before becoming the most famous American writer of his time.

Going West

In the spring of 1835, in a modest house in a little town next to the river Salt, in the state of Missouri, a little boy was born. His parents, John and Jane Clemens, called him Samuel; it was their fifth child. The Clemens family had emigrated from the state of Tennessee hoping to start a new life in the West. Like many other thousands of Americans at the time, they had traveled to the "frontier", on the border of "civilized" America, and they had entered the great unknown territories.

All those pioneers dreamt of colonizing the plains, the mountains and the woods of the West, where the Indians still lived in freedom.