Today in the 180th anniversary of the birth of Mark Twain. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on this day in 1835.
"To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing."
--from "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876)
--from "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876)
Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century's greatest chroniclers of childhood, and of all his works his beloved novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer most enchantingly and timelessly captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy. Tom Sawyer is as clever, imaginative, and resourceful as he is reckless and mischievous, whether conning his friends into painting a fence, playing pirates with his pal Huck Finn, witnessing his own funeral, or helping to catch a murderer. Twain’s novel glows with nostalgia for the Mississippi River towns of his youth and sparkles with his famous humor, but it is also woven throughout with a subtle awareness of the injustices and complexities of the old South that Twain so memorably portrays. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/1…/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/
