The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain · Adventure · 36 chapters · 5h 45m · 9 voices

Tom Sawyer whitewashes a fence, falls in love, runs away to play pirate, witnesses a murder in a graveyard, and gets lost in a cave with the villain Injun Joe. Twain's warmly comic portrait of boyhood in a Mississippi River town.

Lighter than its sequel and built almost entirely out of set pieces: the whitewashed fence, the funeral the boys attend as mourners for themselves, the graveyard murder, the cave. Twain is being funny at a boy's expense for most of it, which needs a narrator who is amused rather than childish, and a Tom who is completely in earnest. The cast is smaller than Huckleberry Finn's — nine voices — and the book is about six hours, which makes it the easier of the two Mississippi novels to start with.

The voices that carry it

Aunt Polly is cast exasperated rather than stern; her scenes only work if you believe she is losing. Injun Joe is given very little to say and is the more frightening for it.

Chapter one plays without an account. Start listening to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Voice cast

8 characters plus the narrator, each with their own voice. All the voices of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  • Tom Sawyer — A mischievous, imaginative, and irrepressibly dramatic twelve-year-old boy in St. Petersburg, Missouri. A schemer and dreamer who talks his way in and out of everything.
  • Huckleberry Finn — The son of the town drunk — pariah, hero, and Tom's closest friend. Lives outside society's rules and is envied for it by all the boys. Superstitious, loyal, and honest.
  • Aunt Polly — Tom's loving, exasperated guardian — a soft-hearted Missouri woman who can't quite bring herself to punish Tom as firmly as he deserves.
  • Injun Joe — The murderous half-breed villain who kills Dr. Robinson at the graveyard and frames Muff Potter. Cold, menacing, implacably vengeful, terrifying to Tom.
  • Becky Thatcher — The Judge's daughter — Tom's love interest. Pretty, proper, forgiving. Gets lost with Tom in McDougal's Cave.
  • Joe Harper — Tom's companion on the pirate island adventure — his 'bosom friend and sworn enemy.'
  • Sid — Tom's goody-goody half-brother who tattles and behaves perfectly. The comic foil to Tom's chaos.
  • Muff Potter — The gentle, drunken gravedigger framed for Injun Joe's murder. Kind, pathetically grateful for Tom and Huck's small kindnesses.

Chapters

  1. Front Matter 1m
  2. Chapter I 12m
  3. Chapter II 9m
  4. Chapter III 11m
  5. Chapter IV 16m
  6. Chapter V 9m
  7. Chapter VI 18m
  8. Chapter VII 9m
  9. Chapter VIII 9m
  10. Chapter IX 11m
  11. Chapter X 10m
  12. Chapter XI 8m
  13. Chapter XII 8m
  14. Chapter XIII 12m
  15. Chapter XIV 10m
  16. Chapter XV 8m
  17. Chapter XVI 15m
  18. Chapter XVII 6m
  19. Chapter XVIII 15m
  20. Chapter XIX 4m
  21. Chapter XX 8m
  22. Chapter XXI 11m
  23. Chapter XXII 5m
  24. Chapter XXIII 10m
  25. Chapter XXIV 2m
  26. Chapter XXV 10m
  27. Chapter XXVI 13m
  28. Chapter XXVII 5m
  29. Chapter XXVIII 5m
  30. Chapter XXIX 12m
  31. Chapter XXX 15m
  32. Chapter XXXI 15m
  33. Chapter XXXII 5m
  34. Chapter XXXIII 16m
  35. Chapter XXXIV 5m
  36. Chapter XXXV 9m

About this recording

Is Tom Sawyer suitable for children?

Largely yes — it was written for them — but there is a murder in a graveyard and the book carries period racial language, less pervasively than Huckleberry Finn but present.

How long is the recording?

About six hours across thirty-six short chapters, with nine character voices. The chapters are brief enough to make it an easy book to listen to in pieces rather than in long sittings.