"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,...

A dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man regarding the nature of man. It involves ideas of destiny and free will, as well as of psychological egoism. The Old Man asserts that the human being is merely a machine, and nothing more. The Young Man objects, and asks him to go into particulars and furnish his reasons for his position.