First Lines: Tom Sawyer / Huckleberry Finn

Once upon a bye, there was a mischievous boy named Tom Sawyer, who was always getting into trouble, getting off on danger. Like that time when he conned all the boys in town to paint aunt Polly’s fence, while making a sizable profit. Or what about that time when he and his friends went to become pirates, and everyone thought that they drowned in the Mississippi. Only to find that the report of their deaths was an exaggeration. He witnessed murder in the graveyard, got lost in a cave with the pretty new girl in town but got out alive, and managed to retrieve a fortune in gold.

And then there’s Huckleberry Finn, “the juvenile pariah of the village,” son of the town drunk, and like his friend Tom, a bit of a rascal. He fakes his own murder, and travels down the river with the runaway nigger Jim—Yeah, I know. But we’re talking eighteen-seventy-something here. Deal with it.—meeting people, and having all kinds of adventures.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are episodic novels. They’re a string of adventures, loosely tied together. While reading Tom Saywer I realized that I read it ages ago, thereby breaking one of the unwritten rules of my 40 Books Before 40-list. Oh, well, it’s still a hoot. Huck Finn I found less enjoyable, largely due to the author’s painstaking use of Southern dialects.

Book read
Mark Twain — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
First line
‘Tom!’
Book read
Mark Twain — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
First line
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.