Rating: 
Summary: Pudd'nhead
Review: This was my third Twain novel, after Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Although this is a much later work, the similarities are striking: the contrived plot (we have to believe that two babies, entirely unrelated and one with some African heritage, are so alike that even their father cannot tell them apart), the device of having a male character disguise himself as a woman, the cruel treatment by a boy of his adoptive parents, and so on."Pudd'nhead Wilson" is Twain's shortest novel and shows signs of having been pruned. Some characters, -- Rowena, for example -- play a significant part early on, then disappear. Wilson himself plays no part throughout most of the story. My guess is that Twain originally intended a much longer novel, with more incidents and secondary plotlines. The fingerprint aspects of the story will seem quaint, and often downright inaccurate, to the modern reader, but at the time they must have been quite startling. The technique had not yet been officially adopted by law enforcement. Some of you may remember an episode of "Alias Smith and Jones" in which Hannibal learns about fingerprinting from this book. A (perhaps the chief) delight of the book is the selection of aphorisms from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar", appended to each chapter heading. It's a great excuse for Twain to peddle some marvelous quotables. Every reader will choose a favorite; mine is "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry". The Bantam Classics edition has a very poor introduction by Langston Hughes, consisting mostly of a plot synopsis (fine if you want to remove all suspense from your reading experience) padded out with generous quotations from the text. Some editorial notes would have been nice too, to help out with a few unfamiliar phrases; this novel is after all more than a hundred years old. I'm sure there must be better editions out there.
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