SOURCE: "What's in a Name: Sounding the Depths of Tom Sawyer," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XC, No. 3, Summer, 1982, pp. 408-29.

Seelye is an American novelist and the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a reworking of Twain's classic. In the following essay, he interprets the psychological symbolism in Tom Sawyer.

Tom Sawyer is a name as familiar to us as our own. We grow up with it, perhaps are weaned from lesser literature on the book of that title, so that eventually the name and the story attached to it become part of our collective memory, stored away like a half-remembered experience. If one of the pleasures in rereading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the discovery of new, sometimes startling dimensions—for Huck, as Lionel Trilling observed in 1948, grows up as we grow, changes as we change—one of the joys of rereading Tom's Adventures...