The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the first of Mark Twain's novels; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is redolent of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain spent his own youth. A sombre undercurrent flows through the high humour and unabashed nostalgia of the novel; however; for beneath the innocence of childhood lie the inequities of adult reality—base emotions and superstitions; murder and revenge; starvation and slavery. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy.