The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories by Mark Twain

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The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain's fantastical last novelette, took him twelve years-and three long drafts-to complete. Based on boyhood memories of the Mississippi River Valley and of the print shops of Hannibal, the story is set in medieval Austria at the dawn of the printing craft. It is a psychic adventure, full of phantasmagoric effects, in which a penniless printer's apprentice-a youthful, mysterious stranger with the curious name 44-gradually reveals his otherworldly powers and the hidden possibilities of the mind. Ending on a startling note, this surprisingly existential tale reveals a darker side to the author's genius.The Mysterious Stranger is a rarity in the work of Twain-a story in which the author turns his sardonic, free-wheeling wit to the problem of Eternal Evil in a distant time and place. In the other stories presented here, Twain debunks his Gilded Age; he ransacks the backyards of daily life and fable to find his notorious, sometimes preposterous metaphors. He is as apt to deal with the great minds of the law hunting a wayward elephant as with a man who has a bank note no one can cash.In addition to The Mysterious Stranger, this volume includes the stories "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg," "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," "The Story of the Bad Little Boy," "The Diary of Adam and Eve," "Edward Mills and George Benton," "The Joke That Made Ed's Fortune," and "A Fable."
About the Author: Samuel Langhorne Clemenswas born on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. He attended the ordinary western common school until he was twelve, the last of his formal schooling. He became a typesetter and began work on his brother's Hannibal newspaper, publishing his first humorous sketch in 1851. During the next fifteen years he was successively a steamboat pilot, a soldier for three weeks, a silver miner, a newspaper reporter, and a bohemian in San Francisco known as "Mark Twain." At no time during these years did he seriously entertain a career in literature. But in 1865, deeply in debt, he acknowledged a talent for "literature, of a low order, i.e., humorous." In the next forty years, he published more than a dozen books and hundreds of shorter works, including his masterpiece in 1885, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".

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The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories by Mark Twain