The Translated Dialect Edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, fully annotated and illustrated with over 100 of True Williams’s original drawings, is the most enjoyable edition of this novel ever published. Adulthood is a remote prospect to the youths of a riverside village who whitewash a fence, attend school and church, play Robin Hood, experience puppy love, witness a murder, raft on the Mississippi River, skylark on an island, attend their own funerals, get lost in a cave, and find buried treasure. Tom Sawyer is the book that introduces Huckleberry Finn, who will narrate his own story as a masterful sequel to this rollicking, nostalgic fantasy about boyhood. Vastly more critical commentary has been devoted to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn than to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is easy to understand why. An adult narrator tells Tom Sawyer’s story, and all of it takes place in a small village. When Mark Twain had the inspiration to feature an outcast boy from that novel for a sequel, he wisely let Huckleberry Finn relate, in his own priceless voice, the hazardous adventures he undergoes after leaving St. Petersburg. All the same, readers who jump into Huck’s weightier story without first meeting the cast of characters in Tom Sawyer are starting in medias res, cheating themselves of the simpler warm-up book before undertaking a complex and rewarding spin-off masterpiece, and defeating Mark Twain’s plan to produce an integral chronicle in two volumes. (He would attempt additional sequels, but those lacked the magic of these first books.)
