The adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

A boy made for mischief, Tom constantly grieves his Aunt Polly with his cunning tricks to get out of school and to lead an idle life of swimming and larking by the banks of the Mississippi. His scrapes vary from whitewashing a fence to witnessing a murder and from running away to be a pirate to hunting by night for buried treasure - but each episode ends with Tom ingeniously on top, as the hero of the village and the envy of all the other boys.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. He was apprenticed to a printer, which began his career of reporting and writing entertaining, humorous sketches. But in 1857 he yielded to his boyhood ambition and trained with the great Horace Bixby as a river-boat pilot (from this experience he took the name Mark Twain). After the Civil War, he returned to journalism and published his first short story in 1865.