The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Thirty yards of picket fence, whitewash going thin under a Missouri sun, and Tom Sawyer persuades half of St. Petersburg to pay him for the privilege of painting it: marbles, a dead rat on a string, a one-eyed kitten, all handed over so someone else can hold the brush. Twain built an entire theory of happiness on it: work is what you are obliged to do, play is what you are not, and the same act can be either, depending only on who is fool enough to want it. But under the games and the truancy and the buried gold runs something colder. At midnight in a graveyard, Tom and Huck watch Injun Joe murder a man, watch an innocent one arrested for it, and swear in blood never to tell what they saw. Later, lost with Becky Thatcher in a cave with the candle guttering out, Tom finds the one crack of daylight that saves them, while the door that would have saved Injun Joe stays sealed. It is still the truest account of what a boy's summer costs.