"In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark Twain combines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial,...

The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed...

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm Eleven-year-old Rebecca is leaving Sunnybrook Farm to live with her spinster aunts and become the educated daughter her family needs. Her aunts resent her father, who left behind nothing for his wife and seven children but a forty-eight-dollar mortgage. When Rebecca climbs out of the stagecoach with her pink parasol, wide-eyed and nervous about her new life, she is quickly met with the strict rules of Aunt Miranda, who has...