The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is argueably the most famous of Mark Twain's novels. His lively tale of the scrapes and adventures of boyhood is set in St. Petersburg, Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of adventures many boys can imagine: racing bugs during class, impressing girls, with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi river.