"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,...

Henry Fleming is a young private in the Union army during the American Civil War--a farm boy untested by battle. Faced with charging rebels, he flees. With his ideals shattered and his heart burdened by shame, Henry seeks an opportunity to redeem himself, even hoping for a wound--a "red badge of courage"--to prove his bravery. Focusing on the inner psychological struggles and sensory perceptions of an individual soldier, Stephen Crane introduced...