PhilPaine.com

Some famous books are obvi­ous mas­ter­pieces, most have a mix­ture of mer­its and flaws, but a few are just plain weird. In the last cat­e­go­ry, few would hes­i­tate to place Mark Twain’s Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger. Even attempt­ing to find and read a copy can be a con­fus­ing task. Twain’s last nov­el exist­ed in a num­ber of frag­men­tary, unfin­ished ver­sions, writ­ten in between 1897 and 1908. None were pub­lished in his life­time. His lit­er­ary execu­tor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Fred­er­ick Dune­ka, an edi­tor at Harp­er & Broth­ers, cob­bled togeth­er a ver­sion and pub­lished it in 1916. This is the ver­sion that became known to the pub­lic. I have just reread this 1916 ver­sion in its orig­i­nal edi­tion, The Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger — A Romance by Mark Twain with Illus­tra­tions by N.C.Wyeth [shown at left]. Wyeth’s illus­tra­tions add great­ly to the plea­sure. He was one of the great­est of book illus­tra­tors in a peri­od that boast­ed Kay Niel­son, Howard Pyle, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rack­ham. How­ev­er, this edi­tion took extra­or­di­nary lib­er­ties with Twain’s work, a fact which was not made plain until 1963, when John S. Tuck­er pub­lished Mark Twain and Lit­tle Satan: The Writ­ing of The Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger. Twain had first attempt­ed the sto­ry in 1897, leav­ing an unti­tled frag­ment [now called the St. Peters­burg Frag­ment]. Between 1897 and 1900, Twain pro­duced a more sub­stan­tial man­u­script which he called The Chron­i­cle of Young Satan. In 1898, he pro­duced a short and much very dif­fer­ent text which he called School­house Hill, incor­po­rat­ing ele­ments from the first two. Final­ly, between 1902 and 1908, Twain pro­duced an almost com­plete ver­sion which he titled No. 44, the Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Trans­lat­ed from the Jug. Tucker’s schol­ar­ship revealed that Paine and Dune­ka had relied pri­mar­i­ly on the ear­li­er Chron­i­cle of Young Satan, had removed sub­stan­tial por­tions, changed names, char­ac­ters, added bits writ­ten by them­selves, and past­ed the last chap­ter of Twain’s final ver­sion onto the pas­tiche. None of these extreme alter­ations was acknowl­edged, an act of lit­er­ary van­dal­ism and fraud that went uncor­rect­ed until the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press pub­lished three of the orig­i­nal man­u­scripts in 1969. No.44, the Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger, Twain’s final ver­sion, did not see pop­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion until 1982, and I have final­ly read this author­i­ta­tive text. Read more »