Puddnhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, by
Mark Twain , is part of the
Barnes & Noble Classics
series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of
Barnes & Noble Classics:
- New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
- Biographies of the authors
- Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
- Footnotes and endnotes
- Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
- Comments by other famous authors
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- Bibliographies for further reading
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Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.
Written during
Mark Twain ’s so-called pessimistic period,
Pudd’nhead Wilson is a darkly comic masterpiece that exposes the wounds of racism in America and the absurdity of judging character based upon class or skin color.
Set in a small Mississippi River town in the state of Missouri before the Civil War, the novel begins when Roxana, a beautiful slave who can pass for white, switches the child of her master with her own infant son, now called Tom, who grows into a cruel and cowardly man. When Tom’s uncle, Judge Driscoll, is found murdered after a botched robbery attempt, suspicion is cast upon two former sideshow performers, Luigi and Angelo Capello, a pair of good-looking and charming identical twins from Italy. Meanwhile, David “Pudd’nhead” Wilson is a wise but unorthodox lawyer who collects fingerprints as a hobby. Shunned as an eccentric, he ultimately wins the respect of the townspeople when he solves the murder mystery and reveals the true identity of the killer.
Often hilarious, sometimes appalling, and always fast-paced,
Pudd’nhead Wilson is ultimately a fierce condemnation of a racially prejudiced society that was predicated upon the institution of slavery.
This edition also includes Twain’s related short story, “Those Extraordinary Twins.”
Darryl Pinckney is the author of
High Cotton, a novel, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series,
Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.
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