A young slave woman, fearing for her infant son's life, exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century mystery: reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising solution. But, seething with the undercurrents of antebellum Southern culture, the book is a ...
Read More
A young slave woman, fearing for her infant son's life, exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century mystery: reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising solution. But, seething with the undercurrents of antebellum Southern culture, the book is a savage indictment in which society is the criminal and racial prejudice and slavery are the crimes.
Read Less
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good in very good dust jacket. Crisp jacket with remains of price sticker, no marks in book. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 254 p. Thorndike Classics. Audience: General/trade. Mark Twain is an extraordinarily funny writer. His observations of the ridiculous in human nature are never better than in this book, about the switching of eight month old babies, one a privileged heir, the other a slave, and how this eventually comes to light. Twain titles the book a tragedy, true enough when one considers that it involves a murder that is solved, very dramatically, in the courtroom by use of fingerprints. But his portraits of the various characters are priceless, He pokes at the worst trait of each character, using biting satire to make their foibles clear. And nobody escapes his sharp pen. My only negative is his constant use of slave dialect, which was wearying. By far the best part of the book is at the very end, in a postscript called "Author's Note to 'Those Extraordinary Twins'". In it, Twain describes the difficulty of having a tale start one way and end another, and I laughed out loud over and over as I read it. If you read the book, be sure to read the postscript!
