Lthough this was written primarily to entertain the little world book, so I may hope surely that it would not left entirely unnoticed by adults, I do have is trying to show them in a pleasant way, what they once were themselves how they felt, thought, talked, and what their ambitions and ventures were.

M ost of the stories told here adventures have really happened. I experienced one or the other myself, the others my schoolmates. Huck Finn is drawn from life, no less Tom Sawyer, but this does not correspond to a certain personality, but was endowed with characteristic features of several of my contemporaries.

I must note here that at the time of my story - thirty to forty years ago -  the strangest, most improbable prejudices and superstitions still prevailed among the underage and ignorant of the West.

​

  Hartford, 1876.

The author.  

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

In the book, Mark Twain describes a number of events he personally experienced. As a template for the literary site “St. Petersburg “, the author has the city  Hannibal  near  St. Louis  used, in which he grew up himself (which is why it is possible to visit places from the Romanes - such as the caves - actually still today.). This fact is considered to be the reason that the novel, unlike its successor  Huckleberry Finn , the character one  idyll  and describes a harmonious and intact world overall.

​

The narrative perspective also results from this: there is an ironic, distant narrator who describes the boys' experiences. First the first-person perspective, to which Mark Twain in  Huckleberry Finn  changes, takes moral conflicts seriously and in this way makes social criticism possible.