The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835-1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the Lincoln of our literature."

Robert Tilton is a Associate Professor of English and Department Head at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative and co-author of Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend, George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths, Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal, and Lee and Grant, and has written the Introduction to the Signet Classics edition of Cooper's The Deerslayer.  

Geoffrey Sanborn, Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, is the author of The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader, Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori, and Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions.