This is Mark Twain’s first novel about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it has become one of the world’s best-loved books. It is a fond reminiscence of life in Hannibal, Missouri, an evocation of Mark Twain’s own boyhood along the banks of the Mississippi during the 1840s. Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred, he tells us. This is a book one never forgets: Tom whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence, Tom and Huck’s dreadful oath, their cure for warts ( spunk water and dead cats), Tom’s puppy love for Becky Thatcher, the boys playing pirate on Jackson’s Island. This Mark Twain Library text is the only edition since the first (1876) to be based directly on the author’s manuscript and to include all of the 200 rattling pictures Mark Twain commissioned from one of his favorite illustrators, True W. Williams.