Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

by Twain, Mark; Bradbury, Malcolm

• ISBN13: 9780140430400
• ISBN10: 0140430407
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1969-09-30
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• More Book Details

Summary

Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins contain Twain's most overt treatment of the moral and societal implications of slavery in America. This Norton Critical Edition remains the only edition available that is based on completely re-edited texts, accounting for all versions that Twain might have written or influenced. All substantive variants in the two separate "first editions," one printed in Britain and the other in the United States, have been reconciled in this collated edition, with all rejected variants tabulated. Dozens of additional illustrations accompany the text, and all textual variants, accepted or rejected, are included. "Criticism" includes twenty-three reviews and interpretive essays, eight of them new to the Second Edition, including those by Andrew Jay Hoffman, Myra Jehlen, and John Carlos Rowe.A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Author Biography

Mark Twain, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting that inspired his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at 12 when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, described by writer William Dean Howells as “the Lincoln of our literature.” Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had four children—a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean.

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) was an English novelist, critic, television dramatist, and professor of American studies and creative writing. Some of his most well-known books include The History Man, which won the Royal Society of Literature's W. H. Heinemann Prize and was adapted into a famous television series; and Rates of Exchange, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Professor Bradbury was awarded the CBE in 1991 for his services to literature and was knighted in the 2000 New Year's Honours list.

Table of Contents

Mark Twain	7	(2)
Peter Coveney
Introduction	9	(38)
Malcolm Bradbury
Suggestions for Further Reading	47	(2)
A Note on the Text	49	(2)
PUDD'NHEAD WILSON	51	(2)
A Whisper to the Reader	53	(174)
Those Extraordinary Twins	227	(78)
Appendix: Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar	305	(12)
Notes	317