The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, originally published in 1876, was the first novel written on a typewriter. Mark Twain’s lively story of the scrapes and activities of boyhood is defined in St. Petersburg, Missouri, where Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn have the kinds of activities many boys can see right now: racing bugs during class, impressing girls, especially Becky Thatcher, with battles and stunts in the schoolyard, obtaining lost in a cave, and playing pirates in the Mississippi River.