The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Alienating Literature Lovers Everywhere
I’m resisting the urge to choose John Milton’s Paradise Lost. By that statement, I just lost credibility with all Brit Lit canon lovers.

PL was my first instinct because I had to take a semester-long Milton class in grad school and found PL needlessly long and the language inaccessible (the impatience of a hopeless American lit reader). However, I did not pick PL as my "great book but not to me" choice today because:
- the scope of the work is so magnificent, and that has to count for something.
- Milton became completely blind sometime around 1652. PL was not published till 1667, so it’s safe to say at least a bulk of the work was done through dictation, making the lyricism of the poem even more impressive.
- he is considered by some to have ushered in the Romantic movement. You can’t disqualify groundbreakers.

So Then...
So then what should be allowed in the canon? I think it has to be something that impacts society with its message and its form.

So what shouldn’t be in the canon? I would postulate: books that don’t accomplish the aforementioned. My pick for the day…

Now to Alienate the American Lit Fans (and My Fellow Missourians)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I love Twain’s witty one-liners, and his short stories are entertaining. But is all his work just that—entertaining? While entertainment may be a great criterion for picking your next beach book, selection for the canon should involve something more worthwhile.

My issue is that Tom Sawyer is plot-rich and humorous, but that’s about it (to me). I’ll go a step farther and say I’m not even entirely impressed with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn either. Once you’ve read one, you’ve as much as read the other (minus heavier racial issues in Finn and what some would call satire of American bigotry). While I grant that we see young characters faced with moral choices, wouldn’t that be said for any coming-of-age story? How is Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn any better than any other bildungsroman (fun lit term of the day)?

My Opponents Would Say…
Twain’s novels, by virtue of their context, involve heavy race relations issues. But that’s just it—it’s a matter of context. Any work written in that setting would naturally address those issues. Some would say Twain’s work is important because it set the pace for other American writers to begin exploring race relations in America. But that can’t be true because it disregards the many slave narratives and fiction such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

All in All
Ultimately I suppose I will always just think of Twain’s work as “just good books.” Nothing wrong with that for juvenile fiction, but I think that’s a far cry from living up to all the hype of America’s first great writer.