Tom Sawyer a shrewd & adventurous boy is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant & parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures accidentally witnessing a murder establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused as well as being hunted by Injun Joe the true murderer eventually escaping & finding the treasure that Joe had buried. Huckleberry Finn recounts the further adventures of Huck who runs away from a drunken & brutal father & meets up with the escaped slave Jim. They float down the Mississippi on a raft participating in the lives of the characters they meet witnessing corruption moral decay & intellectual impoverishment. Sharing so much in background & character these two stories the best of Twain indisputably belong together in one volume. Though originally written as adventure stories for young people the vivid writing provides a profound commentary on provincial American life in the mid-nineteenth century & the institution of slavery.