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.

When a mulatto slave woman switches her own infant with the look-alike son of a wealthy merchant, it takes Pudd'nhead Wilson, the town eccentric, to put things right again.

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

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 1969.

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.

When a murder takes place in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd “black” son who has been raised “white,” and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man. In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Mark Twain’s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it. Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.