Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(Mark Twain)

Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835. With three siblings dead, Sam grew up with another three by the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. The locale acted as inspiration for two of his best-known works- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His young life was filled with various occupations, moving from typesetter, riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, Confederate soldier during the Civil War, governor’s secretary, and miner, until finally settling on writing as a journalist and using the pen name ‘Mark Twain.’

Paid to write travel journals, Twain met Charles Landgon abroad. Landgon showed Twain a picture of his sister- Olivia- that made Twain instantly enamored. After marrying Olivia, they moved close to her family in the Northeast, where he made friends amongst the intellectual, wealthy, liberals of the area. There, he owned and worked on the Buffalo Express newspaper and had four children.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and its main character was inspired by not only his own youth but by John B. Briggs and William Bowen. While it didn’t quite make give him the literary clout Huckleberry Finn did, it was an amazingly popular book.

Settings

St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg is a fictional, small town in Minnesota based upon Mark Twain’s home of Hannibal, MO. It lies right near the Mississippi River.

Jackson Island

Jackson Island is a small strip of land that lies close to the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. It’s where the boys spend a few days pretending to be pirates while the town is convinced they’ve died.

McDougal’s Cave

The McDougal’s Cave is an extensive series of underground tunnels near the town St. Petersburg. Its entirety is unmapped at the time of the story’s telling, which leads to Tom and Becky getting lost within its depths. After Tom manages to find a way out, the entrance is boarded up, leading to the inadvertent death of Injun Joe.