“TOM SAWYER dreams himself up. We ourselves have daydreams, yet how rarely they are fulfilled. But Tom's imaginings are real to him— he becomes the pirate about whom he fantasized and does discover the buried treasure that he was certain he knew how to find. Tom Sawyer lives his dreams.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom's inflation of reality mixes inextricably with the actual turn of events, and becomes the stuff of glorious adventure—and unexpected danger. Thus, a superstition about the curing of warts leads Tom and his friend, Huckleberry Finn, to witness a murder in the dead of night in a graveyard. Then they are torn between their guilt at letting the wrong man be accused and their dread of the true murderer's wrath.
Mark Twain, the real creator of Tom Sawyer, easily combined fantasy with humor. In Tom Sawyer, this takes the form of a delicious irony, showing the contrast between Tom's self-dramatization and the everyday events of his life. Ruminating upon the insult of the young girl with whom he is infatuated, Tom thinks, "She would be sorry someday—maybe when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die temporarily!" Tom does indeed later attend his own funeral, and listens to his eulogy with a satisfaction that many of us experience only in our most self-pitying reveries.
Twain's humor also attends the unnoticed moments in childhood. To every child who has felt despair at the prospect of what seems to be an endless sermon in church, Mark Twain gives the consolation of comedy in a scene in which a lowly beetle becomes the

expression of this exquisite torture. Bitten by "a large black beetle with formidable jaws—a 'pinch bug,' " Tom shakes it off into the aisle,
Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along,... .He surveyed the prize; walked around it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy the diversion;...
The beetle's slow torture parallels that of his watchers. The poodle, forgetting about the pinch bug, sits on it, leaps up, and becomes "a wooly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light," to the satisfaction of all Tom's fellow sufferers, young and old. Desperately trying to hide their mirth, the congregants feel that this revenge against the minister is just and sweet.
Where children will shiver with Tom and Becky when they are lost in the labyrinth of underground caves, adults who read this book will smile in recognition at Mark Twain's wry philosophizing: "Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid of it." Twain spoke out against sham and pretense, whether in the homely health journals that "customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before" or in the institution of the minister's sermon, "that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small to be hardly worth the saving."
Mark Twain's early life was filled with adventure. Born Samuel Clemens in Missouri in 1835, he was by turns a journeyman printer and newspaperman, a steamboat pilot, a miner, and a reporter. In his writing, he transformed his experiences with the brilliance of his humor. Tom Sawyer was written from 1874 to 1875, long after Mark Twain had achieved fame. Its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was first published in America in 1885.
Mark Twain distilled the essence of childhood memories into moments of drama, perfectly highlighted by Tom's wild fancies. His book presents a dare to its readers to taste the thrill of freedom, as does Tom, by realizing one's dreams.”
ELLEN S. SHAPIRO