By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
For some perspective on just how long folks have enjoyed Mark Twain’s writing, consider that he published his classic novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 150 years old in 1876.
That is the year the United States celebrated its independence centennial. Former Union Army General and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was president. And the transcontinental railroad was only seven years old.
Closer to my home, Utah was a territory, not a state. The Mormons openly practiced polygamy. And Brigham Young was still alive.
Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens) sent printers the final Tom Sawyer manuscript in January 1876. He published the book in England the following June and then in the United States a few months later.
Twain had a couple of interesting Utah moments before releasing his great American novel. One was a memorable 1861 encounter with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City.
Twain claims Brigham Young ignored him when he and his brother Orion made a courtesy call on the Mormon leader. As the meeting ended, Young patted the young Twain on the head and said to Orion, “Ah—your child, I presume? Boy or girl?”
Twain got a bit of journalistic revenge for the alleged slight in his 1872 book Roughing It. He famously (and fictionally) described Young’s “7-foot-long, 96-foot-wide bed,” built for him and all his wives.
Twain encountered Utah once again in 1875, when he filed a copyright infringement lawsuit involving his 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. He won the Utah court case after instructing his Salt Lake City lawyers: “No compromise with thieves on any terms, not even for the entire proceeds.”
I first discovered Twain and his books a century later in Northern Utah during a school play, when I was just a bit older than Tom Sawyer. I loved Twain’s tales about Tom tricking others to whitewash the fence, showing off for girls, and running all through town.
Although Tom Sawyer and his friends loved pirates, Twain did not. The same year his famous book about boyhood mischief was published, Twain battled against pirated unauthorized versions printed in Canada.
The initial sales for Tom Sawyer were slow, but royalties picked up after 1885, when Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a subtitle referring to Tom too. The popularity of Twain’s book about Huck increased the public’s appetite for Twain’s book about Tom.
Over the course of 150 years, Tom Sawyer has made an indelible mark on the American cultural psyche. Wikipedia says there are dozens of films or TV shows featuring Tom Sawyer in one context or another.
In the classic 1946 holiday movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel named Clarence Oddbody saves George Bailey while holding a copy of Tom Sawyer. Perhaps Clarence decided to show George what life would be like without him after reading how Tom watched his own funeral and was touched by the love expressed for him there.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer also is often at the center of ongoing American social and racial debates. The book uses the “N word” in some dialogue and some characters express prejudicial views towards Blacks and Native Americans.
Was Tom ignorant or tolerant of the evils of slavery and racism? If yes, did he ever grow out of those views? Does Tom represent the unthinking acceptance of the slaveholding Dixie? Is Tom intended as an intended contrast with Huck, who evolves into a person with purer motives and helps free Jim from slavery?
Twain grew up in the Antebellum South and both his parents and grandparents owned slaves. In his autobiography, Twain said he “had no aversion to slavery” during his youth and was “not aware that there was anything wrong about it.”
Yet, he evolved into an abolitionist and supported Abraham Lincoln’s acts of emancipation. In his 1889 book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Twain wrote rather definitively: “The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over…”
In the first few decades after publication, there were mixed reactions to Tom Sawyer in Utah too. The Intermountain Catholic condemned the book in 1909 after a murderer’s father claimed Twain’s “dime store novels” had been his son’s “mental food” for many years.
The Utah Catholic newspaper said few men “had done more to corrupt the youth of this country” than Twain, and suggested his books be flung “into the fire.” The paper also claimed Twain was trying to convince boys that in order “to win the respect of their elders they must begin by being ruffians, liars, and toughs.”
In September 1902, however, The Deseret News criticized a Denver library for banning Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The News wrote, “[N]o books have been more warmly applauded, none have been so widely accepted as among the very best books for the young.”
The Salt Lake Tribune also defended Twain’s books in May 1906 when a Brooklyn library said no one under age 15 should read them. In July 1910, a few months after Twain died, my hometown newspaper The Ogden Standard-Examiner wrote, “This year of all others Mark Twain must not be forgotten.”
I agree. And so few years ago I sat on bench with a bronzed Twain outside the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa.
Among other things, we chatted about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
I told Twain I was amused that so many scenes of Tom’s mischief play out, of all places, in church. I agreed with Tom’s conclusion that there is “more satisfaction” in the “divine service” when there is “a bit of variety in it.”
I explained how I, like Tom, had gained some pleasing mental revenge against the parents or teachers who admonished me by imagining how grief stricken they would be at my sudden and unexpected demise: “He pictured himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid. Ah, how would she feel then?”
I also told Twain I loved his description of Tom’s cat (Peter) reacting to a dose of the elixir Aunt Polly usually gave Tom: “Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flowerpots, and making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty hurrah, and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the flowerpots with him.”
And I complimented Twain on his clever side commentary to us readers, including witticisms such as “Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it,” and “[T]o promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.”
Although the bronze Twain from the Mississippi River museum just listened to me—and had nothing more to say beyond what he had already said—I am glad we had those few moments together.
150 years ago, Twain ended his classic American novel with this eclectic and rather unexpected conclusion: “When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop – that is, with a marriage; but when he writes about juveniles, he must stop where he best can.”
And so it is with blog posts too.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
