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 »
