SOURCE: "Tom Sawyer and the Use of Novels," in The Curious Death of the Novel: Essays in American Literature, Louisiana State University Press, 1967, pp. 88-99.

Rubin is an American critic, educator, and novelist. In the following essay, he argues that Tom Sawyer presents a unique portrait of American life.

Because Mark Twain is so important a figure in American literary history, and because The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is his first work of fiction, there is the temptation to dwell on the historical aspects of the novel. Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), it can be approached as a guide to what life was like along the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War, as a mirror of the pivotal position the Missouri region occupied in the slavery controversy, as a species of "frontier humor," and so on.

Such investigations are often extremely interesting. Yet when one...