In Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain looked 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 life 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 fractured 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 mastdrs, a son who sells his own mother down the river, a mother who has given her son an entirely differentidentity (and can take it away), with a pair of dispossessed twin Italian counts thrown in for good measure--the world of Pudd'nhead W/lson is a world of reversals, disguises, and duplicity.

  In Pudd"nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain looked 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 life 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 fractured 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 mastdrs, a son who sells his own mother down the river, a mother who has given her son an entirely differentidentity (and can take it away), with a pair of dispossessed twin Italian counts thrown in for good measure--the world of Pudd"nhead W/lson is a world of reversals, disguises, and duplicity.

INTRODUCTION

CHRONOLOGY OF MARK TWAm"S

  LIFE AND WORK

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF Pudd"nhead Wilson

     PUDD"NHEAD WILSON

A WHISPER TO THE REAER

  X. PUDD"NHEAD WINS HIS NAME

  II. DRISCOLL SPARES HIS SLAVES

 Ill. RoxY PLAYS A SHREWD TRICK

  IV. THE WAYS OF THE CHANGELINGS

V. THE TWINS THRILL DAWSON"S LANDING

  VI. SWIMMING IN GLORY

 VII. THE UNKNOWN NYMPH

VIII. MARSE TOM TRAMPLES His CHANCE

  LX. TOM PRACTICES SYCOPHANCY

  X. THE NYMPH REVEALED

 XL  PUDD"NHEAD"S STARTLING DISCOVERY

XII. THE SHAME OF JUDGE DRISCOLL

XIII. TOM STARES AT RUIN

XIV. ROXANA INSISTS UPON RPORM

 XV. THE ROBBER ROBBED

XVI. SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

XVII. THE JUDGE UTTERS DIRE PROPHECY

XVIII. ROXANA COMMANDS

XIX. THE PROPHECY REALIZED

 XX. THE MURDERER CHUCKLES

XXI. DOOM

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  INTERPRETIVE NOTES

  CRTICAL EXCERPTS

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INTERESTED READER