Variados

The Prince and the Pauper

1881. From Mark Twain, one of the most widely loved and celebrated American writers, comes the story about Young Prince Edward, who lived a life of luxury with servants to grant his every wish and Tom Canty, who spent his days begging on the streets, and his nights in a hovel with his tyrannical father. When the two boys meet, a simple switch of clothing sets them ona path they'd never dreamed possible. The prince, mistaken for Tom, is forced to live a pauper's life, while Tom unwillingly takes on the life of a prince. And in the end, each boy finds the king inside himself. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
This article is about the unfinished work by Mark Twain. For the 1921 film, see The Mysterious Stranger (film). Forthe David Blaine book, see Mysterious Stranger.
The Mysterious Stranger   |

Frontispiece of 1st edition "Eseldorf was a paradise for us boys" |
Author(s) | Mark Twain |
Illustrator | N.C. Wyeth |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre(s) | Novel |
Publisher | Harper & Brothers |
Publication date | 1916,[1] posthumously |
Media type | Print |
Pages | 176 pp |Preceded by | Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc |
The Mysterious Stranger is the final novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. It was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until 1910. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race".
Twain wrote multiple versions of the story, each unfinished andinvolving the character of "Satan". The first substantial version is commonly referred to as The Chronicle of Young Satan and tells of the adventures of Satan, the sinless nephew of the biblical Satan, in an Austrian village in theMiddle Ages. The story ends abruptly in the middle of a scene involving Satan entertaining a prince in India.
The second substantial version Twain attempted to write isknown as Schoolhouse Hill, which involves the familiar characters of Huckleberry Finnand Tom Sawyer and their adventures with Satan, referred to in this version as "No. 44, New Series 864962", and is set in America. Schoolhouse Hill is the shortest of the three versions.
The third version, called No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from theJug, returns to Medieval Austria and tells of No. 44's mysterious appearance at the door of a print shop and his use of heavenly powers to expose the futility of mankind's existence. This version also introduces an idea Twain was toying with at the end of his life involving a duality of the "self", one being the "Waking Self" and the other being the "Dream Self". Twain explores these ideasthrough the use of "Duplicates", copies of the print shop workers made by No. 44. This version contains an actual ending; however, the version is not considered as complete as Twain would have intended.
The edition published in 1916 is composed mainly of a heavily edited Chronicle of Young Satan with a slightly altered version of the ending fromNo. 44 tacked on. Albert Bigelow Paine, who had solepossession of Twain's unfinished work after Twain's death and kept them private, searched through Twain's manuscripts and found the proper intended ending for The Mysterious Stranger. After Paine's death in 1937, Bernard DeVotobecame possessor of Twain's manuscripts and released them to the public. Beginning in the 1960s, critics studied the original copies of the story and found that the ending Painechose for The Mysterious Stranger referred to the characters from different versions of the story (e.g. No. 44 instead of Satan) and that the original names had been crossed out and written over in Paine's handwriting.
The book version that was published nonetheless maintains Twain's criticisms on what he believed to be the hypocrisy of organized religion that is the subject of much of Twain's...