Tom sawyer where is he from

He and his companion, an unkempt man, plan to bury some stolen treasure of their own. From their hiding spot, Tom and Huck wriggle with delight at the prospect of digging it up. By an amazing coincidence, Injun Joe and his partner find a buried box of gold themselves. Huck begins to shadow Injun Joe every night, watching for an opportunity to nab the gold. That same night, Huck sees Injun Joe and his partner making off with a box. He follows and overhears their plans to attack the Widow Douglas, a kind resident of St.

By running to fetch help, Huck forestalls the violence and becomes an anonymous hero. Tom and Becky get lost in the cave, and their absence is not discovered until the following morning. The men of the town begin to search for them, but to no avail. Tom and Becky run out of food and candles and begin to weaken. The horror of the situation increases when Tom, looking for a way out of the cave, happens upon Injun Joe, who is using the cave as a hideout.

Eventually, just as the searchers are giving up, Tom finds a way out. Injun Joe, trapped inside, starves to death. Whether or not one has read the novel, many of the scenes are familiar and have become a part of our cultural heritage: Consider for example, the scene in which Tom manipulates others to paint a fence he himself was to have painted, the scene with Tom and Becky lost in the cave, and the scene of the boys in the graveyard.

Twain captures the essence of childhood, with all its excitement, fear, and mischievousness. Although Tom Sawyer is set in a small town along the western frontier on the banks of the legendary Mississippi River sometime during the s, readers from all parts of the world respond to the various adventures experienced by Tom and his band of friends.

The appeal of the novel lies mostly in Twain's ability to capture--or re-capture--universal experiences and dreams and fears of childhood. In terms of the novel's structure, some critics have dismissed it as being simply a series of episodes.

And it is true that there are many seemingly extraneous scenes; nevertheless, each scene contributes to building a broad picture of the lives of these youths. In the broadest sense, the novel concentrates basically on Tom's--and to a lesser degree, Huck's--development from carefree childish behavior to one that is filled with mature responsibility.

Furthermore, the primary adventure--which features the murder the boys witness and its aftermath--provides a single event that begins in the graveyard and runs throughout the plot of lesser adventures.

The lesser adventures are more episodic, which is typically Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , for example, is a series of episodes connected by the adventure to free the slave Jim. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a dusty, quiet town built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about eighty miles north of St. This is the town--renamed St.

Petersburg in the novel--that Tom and Huck and the other characters inhabit. The Jackson's Island of Tom Sawyer which also appears in Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an actual island located just south of the town, close to the Illinois side of the river. Sampson told the passengers on deck. In the raging surf the vessel swung around broadside. Sawyer raced below deck and dropped into two feet of water.

Through a huge rent, the sea was filling up overheated boilers below the waterline, cooling them rapidly. Chief Engineer Jason Collins and his men were fighting to keep steam up to reach shore.

After the coal bunkers flooded, the men began tossing slats from stateroom berths into the furnaces. Loss of the blowers drove the flames out the furnace doors and ignited woodwork in the fire room and around the smokestack.

Steam and flames blasted up from the hatch and ventilators. Collins and James L. Freeborn, the purser, jumped overboard, lost consciousness and sank. Sawyer, a powerful swimmer, dove into the water, caught both men by their hair and pulled them to the surface. As they clung to his back, he swam for the shore a hundred yards away, a feat of amazing strength and stamina.

Depositing Collins and Freeborn on the beach, Sawyer swam back to the burning steamer. He made a number of round trips, swimming to shore with a passenger or two on his back each time. Two broken lifeboats were repaired and launched. Sawyer returned to the flaming vessel in a long boat, rowing hard despite burned forearms to reach more passengers. He got a group into life preservers, then towed them ashore and went back for more. An hour later, the ship was a perfect sheet of flame.

Four days later, the survivors were picked up by American whaling vessels. Ultimately, Sawyer was credited with saving 90 lives at sea, among them 26 people he had rescued singlehandedly.

He himself had a deathly fear of exploding steamers, and for good reason. In , Twain had gotten his brother Henry, then 20, an unpaid post as a junior purser on the New Orleans steamer Pennsylvania. On June 13, the Pennsylvania exploded 60 miles below Memphis.

Four of the eight boilers blew up the forward third of the vessel. Henry died close to dawn on June O, God! This is hard to bear. Twain blamed himself and, at the time he and Sawyer met, was still reliving the tragedy in his memory by day and in vivid dreams by night.

Well, I was pretty well-heeled—had eight hundred dollars in my inside pocket—and as there was nothing much doing in Frisco, I went. Sawyer had an exciting few nights with Sam and his friends, drinking and gambling. He moved into rooms in the new White House Hotel, and when it caught fire on July 26, most of his possessions and all his mining stocks were burned to ash.

In Roughing It , he fictionalized the reason for his sudden poverty. The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. Twain returned to San Francisco in September , a time of writing feverishly and much carousing.