PUDD‘NHEAD WILSON

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Not available
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: In Pudd'nhead Wilson (1897), Mark Twain looks back to the same antebellum Southern life he had recorded in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What he found there, however, could not be reconciled with the myth he had previously memorialized. Confronted by violent white Southern backlash against African Americans and the wild economic disparities and swift changes of the Gilded Age, Twain produced a famously fragmented and fantastic novel. Switched babies, white-skinned "black" slaves, a man dressed as a woman, a woman dressed as a man, masters who are slaves and slaves who become masters, a son who sells his own mother down the river to a mother who has given him an entirely different identity (and can take it away) with a pair of disposed twin Italian counts thrown in for good measure—the world of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a world of reversals, disgusts, and duplicity.