This is a story of a sober kind, picturing life in a little town of Missouri, half a century ago. The principal incidents relate to a slave of mixed blood and her almost pure white son, whom she substitutes for her master's baby. The slave by birth grows up in wealth and luxury, but turns out a peculiarly mean scoundrel, and perpetrating a crime, meets with due justice. The science of fingerprints is practically illustrated in detecting the fraud. The title character is the village atheist, whose maxims doubtless express much of the author's own disillusion.

A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so I was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press without first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and correction by a trained barrister-if that is what they are called. These chapters are right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten under the immediate eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a while in southwest Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over here to Florence for his health and is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni Vermicelli's horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile and yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand where they sell the same old cake to this day and it is just as light and good as it was then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it. He was a little rusty on his law, but he rubbed up for this book, and those two or three legal chapters are right and straight, now. He told me so himself.

Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is a novel by American writer Mark Twain.Its central intrigue revolves around two boys--one, born into slavery,the other,white,born to be the master of the house.The two boys,who look similar,are switched at infancy.Each grows into the other's social role.Originally part of the Pudd'nhead Wilson book, Twain realised during the writing process that the twins were taking a backseat to characters such as Pudd'nhead Wilson,Roxy,and Tom Driscoll.As a result,he took them out and gave them their own short story. He explains all this in the Introduction to this book.

This collection seeks to place Pudd’nhead Wilson—a neglected, textually fragmented work of Mark Twain’s—in the context of contemporary critical approaches to literary studies. The editors’ introduction argues the virtues of using Pudd’nhead Wilson as a teaching text, a case study in many of the issues presently occupying literary criticism: issues of history and the uses of history, of canon formation, of textual problematics, and finally of race, class, and gender. In a variety of ways the essays build arguments out of, not in spite of, the anomalies, inconsistencies, and dead ends in the text itself. Such wrinkles and gaps, the authors find, are the symptoms of an inconclusive, even evasive, but culturally illuminating struggle to confront and resolve difficult questions bearing on race and sex. Such fresh, intellectually enriching perspectives on the novel arise directly from the broad-based interdisciplinary foundations provided by the participating scholars. Drawing on a wide variety of critical methodologies, the essays place the novel in ways that illuminate the world in which it was produced and that further promise to stimulate further study. Contributors. Michael Cowan, James M. Cox, Susan Gillman, Myra Jehlen, Wilson Carey McWilliams, George E. Marcus, Carolyn Porter, Forrest Robinson, Michael Rogin, John Carlos Rowe, John Schaar, Eric Sundquist

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Presents facsimile first editions of Twain's works that include all original illustrations. Each volume contains introductions by literary heavyweights including Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Cynthia Ozick, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley, among others.

A Southern town scandalized by the murder of its most prominent citizen uncovers a mystery even more shocking in this ironic suspense story from a great American master Afraid for her infant son’s life, a slave switches the boy with her master’s child. A young New York lawyer fascinated by palmistry and fingerprint analysis moves below the Mason–Dixon line, makes a bad joke, and is immediately and forever branded a “pudd’nhead.” Two Italian noblemen pay a visit to Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, and become prime suspects in the murder of a local judge. From these disparate plot strands, Mark Twain fashions a humorous and entertaining tale with all the elements of the traditional murder mystery: a case of mistaken identity, a gruesome crime, a sinister villain, an eccentric detective, a climactic courtroom showdown, and an ingenious solution. But beneath this potboiler’s pomp and circumstance lurks a clear-eyed and savagely compelling indictment of slavery and its poisonous effects on American society. Twain’s last novel set in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson offers his clearest and most provocative condemnation of racial prejudice. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.