The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Tom Sawyer and American Identity
In the following essay the author explores the ways in which Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be read as a powerful critique of American identity.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an extremely difficult work to approach analytically because it is so embedded in the reader's own childhood. It is read in classrooms throughout the English-speaking world, and has become iconographic of childhood itself—especially American childhood. Indeed, this has been its reception from its initial publication. The first review, written by William Dean Howells in 1876, called it "a wonderful study of the boy-mind" which exists beyond the control or comprehension of adult society. His comments appeared in Atlantic Monthly before the...
[The entire page is 1788 words long]
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