Adventures of Tom Sawyer: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

by Mark Twain

Overview

As featured on PBS’s The Great American Read

The text of this Norton Critical Edition is based, with typesetting errors corrected, on the first U.S. edition (1876), the most authoritative of the editions published in Twain’s lifetime.

“Backgrounds and Contexts” provides students with the standard source materials often cited by critics—Twain’s stories of Good and Bad Boys, his Boy’s Manuscript, his correspondence with William Dean Howells, and his 1870 letter to Will Bowen. This section also includes lesser-known but valuable contextual materials, among them Twain’s journalistic description of school exercise and the discussion of Perry Davis’ Pain Killer and other nineteenth-century nostrums.

“Criticism” includes interpretations by William Dean Howells, Hamlin L. Hill, Judith Fetterley, Alan Gribben, Glenn Hendler, Carter Revard, and Susan R. Gannon.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900393926032
Publication date:	12/18/2006
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), best known to the world by his pen-name Mark Twain, was an author and humorist, noted for his novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876, among many others.

Beverly Lyon Clark is Professor of English at Wheaton College. She is author of Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America, Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys, Lewis Carroll, and Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror-Worlds of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon. Her edited volumes include the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews and Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture.

Date of Birth:

November 30, 1835

Date of Death:

April 21, 1910

Place of Birth:

Florida, Missouri

Place of Death:

Redding, Connecticut