The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, originally published in 1876, was the first novel written on a typewriter. Mark Twain's 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 (especially Beck Thatcher) with fights and stunts in the schoolyard, getting lost in a cave, and playing pirates on the Mississippi River.