汤姆索亚历险记学习指导 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.docVIP

Context Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and grew up in nearby Hannibal, a small Mississippi River town. Hannibal would become the model for St. Petersburg, the fictionalized setting of Twain’s two most popular novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The young Clemens grew up in a prosperous family—his father owned a grocery store as well as a number of slaves—but he was sent out to work at the age of twelve after his father’s death. As a young man, he traveled frequently, working as a printer’s typesetter and as a steamboat pilot. In this latter profession he gained familiarity with the river life that would furnish much material for his writing. He also gained his pen name, Mark Twain, which is a measure of depth in steamboat navigation. Twain enlisted in the Confederate militia in 1861, early in the Civil War, but he soon left to pursue a career in writing and journalism in Nevada and San Francisco. His articles and stories became immensely popular in the decades that followed. On the strength of this growing literary celebrity and financial success, he moved east in the late 1860s and married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prominent Elmira, New York, family. Twain and Langdon settled in Hartford, Connecticut; there Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he published in 1876. Twain proceeded to write, among other things, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and two sequels to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). He died in 1910, one of America’s most beloved humorists and storytellers. While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer retains some of the fragmented, episodic qualities of Twain’s earlier, shorter pieces, the novel represents, in general, a significant literary departure for Twain. He toned down the large-scale social satire that characterized many of his earlier works, choosing instead to depict the sustained devel