Tom Sawyer Abroad

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Jim climb into the basket of a strange balloon at a fair in St Louis, and when its inventor, a mad professor, takes off, they are carried across the Atlantic. After he falls overboard, they fly on alone over the Sahara, where they see a caravan, a lion hunt and a mirage, and land on the Sphinx and the pyramids of Egypt, while Tom and Huck argue about geography, the Crusades and the size of the world.

Mark Twain published the short novel in 1894, narrated, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Huck himself. Compare Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon and read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.