Books: Great American Boyhood

SAM CLEMENS OF HANNIBAL (335 pp )—Dixon Wecter—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . . . was made by Mr. Mark Twain," explains Huckleberry Finn in opening the tale of his own adventures, "and he told the truth mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

Mainly, and with no more stretch than a sly grin puts on a freckle, Huck was right. The golden dream of boyhood, the soft summer's day that Mark Twain invoked for the world in Tom and even more richly in Huck, was in fact an almost total recall of the...