The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A boy in a Mississippi river town talks his friends into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing a fence, and the scene is so well known that it is easy to forget the book around it is partly a murder story. Tom and Huck watch a killing in a graveyard at midnight, swear an oath not to tell, and then have to live with an innocent man on trial for it.

Twain wrote it as a book about boyhood for adults and then let his publisher sell it to children, and the double aim is visible on every page. The pranks and the treasure and the funeral the boys attend as their own are pure adventure. The town around them — its piety, its gossip, its casual cruelty — is being observed by somebody with a very cold eye.

It is the lighter of the two Mississippi books, and Twain knew it; the darker one came eight years later with Huck telling his own story. Read this one for the river, the cave, and a childhood written by a man who remembered that children are not sweet.