Tom Sawyer

Tom Sawyer is the mischievous, imaginative protagonist of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, set in the fictional Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Raised by his Aunt Polly after the death of his parents, Tom is a restless boy given to elaborate schemes and daydreams of adventure, most famously tricking his friends into whitewashing a fence for him by convincing them the chore is a rare privilege. Over the course of the novel he witnesses a murder committed by the villainous Injun Joe, gets lost with his love interest Becky Thatcher in a cave where Injun Joe is later trapped and dies, and eventually finds a cache of buried treasure with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer reappears as a secondary character in Twain's later and more serious novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the two boys together became enduring emblems of nineteenth-century American boyhood and small-town river life.