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