Pudd'nhead Wilson

Mark Twain · 1894 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Victorian

A young lawyer arrives in a Missouri river town, makes one remark the citizens find idiotic, and spends twenty years as Pudd'nhead, collecting fingerprints as a hobby. In the same weeks a slave woman one-sixteenth black, afraid her son will be sold downriver, switches him in the cradle with her master's heir, and the boys grow up as master and servant. Twain's grimmest book, and the one that makes race a legal fiction rather than a fact.

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