Tom Sawyer

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Tom Sawyer
Frontispiece of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer
First appearance	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Last appearance	Tom Sawyer, Detective
Created by	Mark Twain
Information
Gender	Male
Family	Aunt Polly (aunt), Mary (cousin). Sid (half-brother)
Address	the Antebellum South on the Mississippi River in St. Petersburg, Missouri
Nationality	North American

This article is about the fictional character Tom Sawyer. For other uses, see Tom Sawyer (disambiguation)

Tom Sawyer is a fictional character created by Samuel Clemens, under the pen-name Mark Twain. He is widely known as the title character of the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He appears in three other novels by Clemens: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). Sawyer also appears in at least three unfinished Twain works, Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy. While all three uncompleted works were posthumously published, only Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy boasts a complete plot, as Clemens abandoned the other two works after only finishing a few chapters. The character's name may have derived from a real life Tom Sawyer with whom Clemens was acquainted in San Francisco, California while Clemens was employed as a reporter at the San Francisco Call. [1] The character himself is an amalgam of several boys Clemens knew while growing up^[1]. Tom Sawyer is a cunning, playful boy. He is around twelve years old. His best friends include Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is apparent that Tom is infatuated with Rebecca (alias Becky) Thatcher. He has a half-brother, Sid, a cousin, Mary, and his aunt is known as Aunt Polly, all of whom he lives with. Tom is Aunt Polly's dead sisters' son. It is unknown how Tom's mother died. Among the adventures Tom gets himself into are revealing Injun Joe's crime, getting trapped in a cave with Becky Thatcher, and discovering Injun Joe's treasure.

Appearances in works by other creators

Tom Sawyer appears as an adult in the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where his characterization is based loosely on his appearance in Tom Sawyer Abroad.

References