THE TIME AND PLACE
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is set in a
Mississippi river town called St. Petersburg and
is based on Twain’s real hometown of Hannibal,
Missouri, about eighty miles north of St. Louis.
The time is the mid-1840s. During the course of
the novel, the characters spend time on an
island in the river about five miles from town
and in a cave several miles outside of town.