Adventure · Humor
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A clever boy on the Mississippi witnesses a murder in a graveyard and goes hunting for buried treasure.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
St Petersburg, Missouri
Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1840s. He hates school, Sunday school and washing, and loves pirates, robbers, adventure books and Becky Thatcher, the new girl in town. Punished with whitewashing a fence on a Saturday, he persuades his friends to pay him for the privilege of doing it for him. One night he and his friend Huckleberry Finn, the town drunkard’s son, sneak into a graveyard with a dead cat to try a cure for warts, and see a murder. Mark Twain published it in 1876, drawing on his own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri.
Why it works for learners
The book is a string of episodes from a boy’s year: school, church, a romance, running away to an island, a trial, a cave. Each is a self-contained story with a clear shape and a joke or a fright at the end. The vocabulary is childhood and small-town life: school, teacher, church, river, island, raft, cave, treasure, aunt, friend. Tom’s schemes, especially the famous fence, are lessons in how to persuade, bargain and boast. In the original, characters speak in Missouri dialect, spelled the way they sound, which can slow learners down. The plot doesn’t depend on it.
Which level to start at
B1 is the best start: the adventures are clear and the humor comes through. A2 works for the main storyline. At B2 and above you’ll catch Twain’s irony about grown-ups, which is half the fun. The narration gives Tom, Huck and Aunt Polly their own voices.
Read next
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s own, deeper story
- The Prince and the Pauper, Twain’s tale of two boys who swap lives
- Treasure Island, the pirate story Tom would have loved