SOURCE: "The Sweet Success of Twain's Tom," in The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, Summer, 1973, pp. 310-24.

Powers is an American educator and critic who has written several studies of Henry James's works. In the following essay, he explores Tom Sawyer's particular appeal to the American temperament.

For almost a century Mark Twain's novel of American boyhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, has enjoyed great popularity and earned a place as one of our foremost popular "classics". Its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, may justifiably be held in greater esteem by the learned reader but has probably not yet usurped the honored place of Tom Sawyer in the popular imagination—nor, perhaps, in the heart of many a learned reader. Everybody knows Tom's story whether he has actually read the book or not: it is somehow un-American not to know it. Critics have been ready to account for and...