Tom Sawyeresque

comparative more Tom Sawyeresque · superlative most Tom Sawyeresque

1. Resembling or characteristic of the fictional character Tom Sawyer.

   Such was the life of John Ruan through the summer of 1929. He had enjoyed a Tom Sawyeresque childhood and learned that hard work and ingenuity paid handsome monetary rewards.

   2003, William B. Friedricks, chapter 1, in In for the Long Haul: The Life of John Ruan, University of Iowa Press, published 2010, →ISBN, page 13

   2 more examples

   Lin P'ei's mother warned him that though P'eng P'ai had no need to fear starvation, the Lin family was not so fortunate. P'eng claims that he bought some time against this threat by a Tom Sawyeresque ruse.

   1977, Roy Hofheinz, Jr., The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922-1928, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, part 3, chapter 7, 149

   I had tried, as had his psychiatrist and several emotionally astute relatives and friends, to confront his stubborn suicidality by making his anger more conscious, by analyzing his irrational but understandable conviction that he was bad, by calling his attention to his wishes to pay his mother back for her abuse of him by mortifying her with his suicide, by realistically looking at what it would mean to his wife and three children if he killed himself, and by exploring his Tom Sawyeresque fantasies of what people would feel and say at his funeral.

   1999, Nancy McWilliams, chapter 7, in Psychoanalytic Case Formulation, The Guilford Press, →ISBN, page 131