The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

For James, the impact on the mind of the dominant forces of modernity impelled him beyond what we would ordinarily see as "realism." Even William Dean Howells found the realism he himself practiced and advocated inadequate to deal with his most principled social concerns. After A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells engaged with the large forces of the new America not in realistic fiction but in the utopian novels A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907). Responding to the energies of the new post-Civil War America, Mark Twain gave the period its name in a novel of the present, The Gilded Age (1873). In successive works, however, Twain moved farther into the past. He drew on his own boyhood and his years as a cub pilot in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), his masterpiece of vernacular realism. In these works he deals with contemporary concerns suggestively but indirectly, a tendency that intensifies in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), set not in the America of Twain's lifetime but in the England of a mythical past ...»