Sawyer and Finn: The War Years

Richard DeLong Adams has performed a remarkable literary tour de force,
bringing back two of our favorite characters, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn, placing them in the Civil War in Missouri. They harmonize with historic
characters, including Congressman Frank Blair, the outlaw Jesse James, and Confederate guerilla Wild Bill Anderson, along with those borrowed from Twain, such as the Widow Douglas, Judge and Becky Thatcher, and Jim, with a few inventions of his own, to create a wonderful tour of one of the tragic episodes in American history. The voices that emerge from this dark storm are potent reminders of who we Americans are, where we come from, and why.

Adams has created authentically American voices on both sides of our most terrible conflict and has traced to their sources the most intractable of U. S. paradoxes, including the Westward Expansion, slavery, miscegenation, agricultural versus urbanized society, North versus South, and commercial against patriotic interests.


Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the book is a voice at once contemporary and authentic to the Missouri of the 1860s. The ever-changing aspects of America’s turn from rural to urban, from slavery to freedom resonate today. We see in Adams’s Huck and Tom not only Twain’s America, but our own, and the thunderous collisions of the ongoing ominous tragedy we still can feel today.


This exceptional novel will delight readers and recall why we’re proud — however
silently, however provisionally — to be Americans.