SOURCE: "Mark Twain's Hymn of Praise," in English Journal, Vol. XLVIII, No. 8, November, 1959, pp. 443-8.

Marks is an American educator and the editor of a critical anthology on Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the following essay, Marks argues that, while Tom Sawyer begins by satirizing social convention, the novel ends with an affirmation of the human need for society.

"A hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air" is the way Mark Twain once described Tom Sawyer, and of course he was right. The book is a song of praise and adoration—not only of the Mississippi Valley in the mid-nineteenth century but of life itself. One way of alluding to the novel's special dimensions is to note that it becomes a hymn rather than is a hymn. It begins in tones of amused cynicism and only becomes joyful affirmation as the...