A&M Books & Coffee Discussion Series with Lecture by Dr. Mattie Thomas

Dr. Mattie Thomas, Chair of the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Telecommunications, will give a lecture entitled,“Tom Sawyer: Mark Twain's Good-Bad Boy.” Daniel Peck claims that Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer in the context of the "good boy-bad boy" moralistic literature such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy. The "bad boy" tradition, according to Peck, follows several paradigms of youthful behavior. There is the "good boy" represented by Sid, Tom's half brother, and the "bad boy" represented by Tom. Tom, however, is a combination of the "bad boy" and the "good boy." In Tom Sawyer, Twain has a "bad boy," but not an outsider like Huckleberry Finn. He is both an outsider and an insider who is able to challenge his society while working within it.