Creator
Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)
Title
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins
Coverage
Hartford
Publisher
American Publishing Company
Date
1894
Description
This later Twain novel is steeped in irony: its eponymous character, a lawyer, is dubbed a “Pudd’nhead” not because of his stupidity, but because the unsophisticated inhabitants of his frontier town misunderstand his cleverness. The main plot of the novel updates the basic concept of The Prince and the Pauper with biting social criticism, contrasting the lives of a pair of young men who were switched at infancy—one white, one 1/32 Black (and thus nonwhite under the “one-drop” principle that guided racist legislation of the era).
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