Publisher Description
The sun shines on Tom Sawyer. The idealized childhood of this fictional hero, based on Mark Twain’s own early life along the banks of the Mississippi, is filled with robust good humor and high-spirited adventures. Yet there is also an in-depth experience of the central South of the 1840s—its dialects, superstitions, and social values. While romping through fun-filled fantasy, Tom Sawyer shows how morally complicated real life can be.
This reading of Tom Sawyer is especially notable for the virtuoso performance of actor Patrick Fraley. Crafting thirty-six authentic “voices” to represent the wide range of Twain’s delightful characters, Fraley proves his storytelling mastery. Hear why this is one of the world’s best-known and best-loved books, appealing to all ages.
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"I taught this novel so many years back when we did such things, and I loved it more every year. I think my kids loved it, too, because what's not to love about Mark Twain, and we had a ball with it. This book is so much deeper than most people see on the surface, and I'm certainly not going into all of that here. Every literary critic in America has been there, done that. But I can wax ethereal about "writing what you know" - from taking out the window jamb when you make your escape from a dead body in the dark in pure fear, as Samuuel Clemens really did and ultimately wove into this book, to writing in the classic beauty of the Mississippi River, complete with Jackson's Island, which has to be the small island out in the river east of Hannibal. Probably not the one we see now since floods have to have changed the scope of the land, but we can imagine it. To this day we refer to Tom Sawyer when we talk about getting people to do what we want to do without lifting a finger just as Tom did when painting the fence. I love this book!"
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Susan (5 out of 5 stars)
About Mark Twain
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.
About Patrick Fraley
Patrick Fraley has created voices for over four thousand characters, placing him among the top ten performers of all time to be cast in animated programs. He holds an MFA in acting from Cornell University and is the author of the only character-voice curriculum ever to be accredited at the university level.