SOURCE: A review of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XXXVII, No. CCXXIII, May, 1876, pp. 617-29.

In the following essay, the critic praises the portrayal of boyhood in the rural American Southwest in Tom Sawyer.

Mr. Aldrich has studied the life of A Bad Boy as the pleasant reprobate led it in a quiet old New England town twenty-five or thirty years ago, where in spite of the natural outlawry of boyhood he was more or less part of a settled order of things, and was hemmed in, to some measure, by the traditions of an established civilization. Mr. Clemens, on the contrary, has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new book, [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which...