One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up.

It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.

I have the two small books of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on a shelf in my living room.

The most poignant moment is in Huckleberry Finn, where (floating on the Mississippi) the protagonist asserts:

"If my friendship damns me to hell, then I'll go to hell with him."

Looking it up...

"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up."

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76/pg76-images.html

People who are exposed to Mark Twain only through Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/A Connecticut Yankee/etc. works usually think of him as a "fun" author.

But he had one of the most incisive and intellectual minds of his times, which was biting in its criticisms/satire of American and the larger Human civilization. Everybody (but Americans especially) should read his set of essays titled; On The Damned Human Race for edification.

I often wonder what he would think of current-day American society and so-called democracy. He actually coined the term "Gilded Age" to highlight the covering of everything rotten/corrupt with a superficial sheen so as to sell it to the masses. If that doesn't describe today's society i don't know what does.

Read, The Lowest Animal (aka The Damned Human Race) by Mark Twain - https://www.thoughtco.com/the-lowest-animal-by-mark-twain-16...

And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – nameable as the Human Being. Below us – nothing.

The passage where Tom goes to whitewash the fence is brilliant.

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/tom-sawyer#:~:text=T...

Relatable to any kids forced to do chores.

First book I've ever read start to finish when I was in school. I remember that we've read a chapter a day in class, each one couple lines until the chapter was done.

To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.

I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.

Highly recommend Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow. I just finished it last week. Samuel Clemens' evolution from where he started to where he finished is something to be admired (just ignore his thoughts on Native Americans, how he treated his children, and his angelfish obsession).

Ah, brings back memories. We did a New Year's school theater presentation in the third grade, playing out the "painting the fence" scene from the book.

In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)

Ernest Hemingway famously declared in his 1935 book Green Hills of Africa that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

When speaking about Tom Sawyer, it's hard to not have the piece of the same title by Rush playing in your head.

Who is today's Tom Sawyer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gztabfs5ngA