Hey everybody, it's your pal Corey Ryan Forster and welcome to public domain sleepy time, the podcast where I read you books and stories and screenplays, etc. in my most calming Southern voice in the hopes that it will help you wind down or Lord Will and fall asleep. Why public domain you ask? Well, due to how copyright laws work, most of the classics that I would want

to read to you are in the public domain. That, and of course, perhaps just as important a reason,

I do not have to pay for them. And this is a grassroots podcast. That said, another big reason is that

the more familiar you are with the story, perhaps the better chance you'll have of getting lost

in it and drifting off to sleep or just relaxing. It's also a good chance for me to discover some

classic works that I didn't know about, or in the case of this first season, rediscover one of my

childhood favorites, as I will be reading to you, the American classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

Now, before we begin, a quick refresher about the novel and the genius who wrote it,

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer came out in 1876. It's Mark Twain's tale of childhood rebellion,

small town mischief, and and of course, moral awakening,

and it's set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, which is a fictionalized and more

idealized version of Twain's boyhood home in Hannibal. The story follows, young Tom Sawyer,

a clever, mischievous little boy with a, I would say, a penchant for drama and adventure from tricking his buddies into whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence to running away to become a pirate, witnessing a murder, and getting lost in a cave, and eventually becoming a town hero.

Tom's escapades paint a pretty vivid picture of life along the Mississippi River in mid-19th century.

The novel is it's comedy, it's suspense, it's social satire, it's nostalgic even though

we're not from this time. And, you know, it also is a pretty,

pretty good, it's, it's fair. I won't even say, yeah, subtle. It's a subtle critique of the

hypocrisies and the superstitions of adults, at least at the time, but I'd say still now,

characters like Huckleberry Finn,

who of course we all know would later star in his own, not just more mature, but more heralded

novel. A lot of people say that it's the great American novel, and I look forward to reading it

to y'all, but I thought it would be unwise to not start with Tom Sawyer.

...