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Not counting The Gilded Age, which was
co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain's first novel. By the time
MT died, it had become an American classic, and it remains
perhaps the best-loved of all his books among general
readers. When it first came out in 1876, however, it was
comparatively a failure. Despite MT's determination "that
Tom shall outsell any previous book of mine," the American
Publishing Co. sold less than 24,000 copies in the book's
first year (compared, for example, to 70,000 for
Innocents Abroad in a comparable period). As an
imaginative act, Tom Sawyer led directly on to the
greatness of Huckleberry Finn and MT's other
fictions of childhood or the Mississippi valley. As a
commercial disaster, it pushed MT in the direction that
would lead him to create his own publishing company.
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