The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Study Guide

Literary Precedents

The mid-nineteenth century produced a number of books dealing with boys rebelling against conventional society, such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy (1869). While Twain's book is a powerful and original addition to literature about young people, it retains some of the "literary" language of nineteenth-century fiction.

Twain abandons these conventions in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which he permits the title character to tell the.....

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