The Great American Rascal: Tom Sawyer at 150

reliabilityguy

First book I've ever read start to finish when I was in school. I remember that we've read a chapter a day in class, each one couple lines until the chapter was done.

madrox

To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century. I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.

anukin

One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up. It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.

emmelaich

The passage where Tom goes to whitewash the fence is brilliant. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/tom-sawyer#:~:text=T... Relatable to any kids forced to do chores.

cyberax

Ah, brings back memories. We did a New Year's school theater presentation in the third grade, playing out the "painting the fence" scene from the book. In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)

fusslo

Highly recommend Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow. I just finished it last week. Samuel Clemens' evolution from where he started to where he finished is something to be admired (just ignore his thoughts on Native Americans, how he treated his children, and his angelfish obsession).

rramadass

People who are exposed to Mark Twain only through Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/A Connecticut Yankee/etc. works usually think of him as a "fun" author. But he had one of the most incisive and intellectual minds of his times, which was biting in its criticisms/satire of American and the larger Human civilization. Everybody (but Americans especially) should read his set of essays titled; On The Damned Human Race for edification. I often wonder what he would think of current-day American society and so-called democracy. He actually coined the term "Gilded Age" to highlight the covering of everything rotten/corrupt with a superficial sheen so as to sell it to the masses. If that doesn't describe today's society i don't know what does. The Lowest Animal by Mark Twain - https://www.thoughtco.com/the-lowest-animal-by-mark-twain-16... And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – nameable as the Human Being. Below us – nothing.