Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer at 150: The Rascal Who Founded American Literature
The Great American Rascal: Tom Sawyer at 150
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer turns 150 this year, and Claremont Review of Books argues it marked a decisive break from Europe's cultural grip. Twain replaced the squeaky-clean 'model boy' with a vivid, mischievous hero who upends staid morality in St. Petersburg, Missouri. The whitewashing fence, the Bible-ticket fraud, and the funeral hoax show Tom as both Nietzschean trickster and chivalrous knight—a figure who enlivens and defends his town.
What he realizes is pure profit, purer profit indeed than Karl Marx ever imagined in his wildest polemics, against the iniquity of surplus value.