The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg


Book Description

Mark Twain's classic tale is a funny yet blistering indictment of political hypocrisy. A mysterious stranger is treated badly by the town of Hadleyburg-the town that proclaims itself "the most honest and upright town in the region." Through an ingenious sting operation, the stranger sets out to expose Hadleyburg's leading citizens and reveal their greedy, deceitful natures. Twain's burning wit and insight into political posturing and civic cowardice seem more pertinent than ever.







The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain


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For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain’s inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” to the bitter vision of humankind in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” to the delightful hilarity of “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” Surging with Twain’s ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career of–in the words of H. L. Mencken–“the father of our national literature.”







The Family Mark Twain


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No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger


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Originally published: Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 1969.




Catch a Falling Star


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It was after midnight in 1990, and a group of NASA technicians are playing chess in the lounge. They never notice the soft clicking noises as radiation detectors kick in and a strange code begins taking over a computer monitor. As a glowing saucer zips past the Voyager, locks itself into orbit around Neptune, rolls over, and then disappears from view, the technicians loudly argue over the rules of the game unaware that aliens are headed toward Earth. Unfortunately, the amphibian-like creatures who reproduce in alarming numbers have made a serious mistake. They have chosen a small town in Iowa as the place to launch their invasion, mistakenly thinking they can attack under a cloak of invisibility. But this rural setting is protected by the Pirates, an elite team of adventurers and foilers of evil plots comprised of the most dangerous creatures on planet Earth young boys. As the alien invaders kidnap one of the pirates and begin to examine him for weaknesses, they have no idea that they have in their possession the girl-hating, chaos-creating nuisance that is the bane of all fourth-grade math teachers in town. It may be the last mistake they'll ever make.




Fools, Knaves and Heroes


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"Our Famous Guest"


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Fin-de-siecle Vienna was a special place at a special time, a city in which the decadent abandon of the era commingled with dark forebodings of the coming century. The artistic and intellectual ferment of the Austrian capital was extraordinary: Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl, Gustave Klimt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were but a few of the figures who lived and worked there. And, in September 1897, into the very midst of this heady milieu, came America's most famous citizen, Mark Twain. Although most of Twain's biographers have mentioned his Viennese sojourn (occasioned by his daughter Clara's musical studies), it has remained an unexplored hiatus in his career. Partly because of impressions created by Twain himself, the twenty months he spent in Vienna are often dismissed as uneventful and unproductive. In "Our Famous Guest" Carl Dolmetsch shows the truth to be otherwise. Upon his arrival Twain found all the doors of the celebrity-mad city, from its literary cafe's to its aristocratic salons, flung wide open to him. The aging writer imbibed freely of Vienna's atmosphere, and the result was a final, astonishing surge of creativity. Among the thirty works that came, either whole or in part, from Twain's Austrian visit were the Socratic dialogue What Is Man?, the "Early Days" section of his Autobiography, Book I of Christian Science, the classic short story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," the polemical essay "Concerning the Jews," and, most important, a major portion of the manuscript cluster known as The Mysterious Stranger. As Dolmetsch notes, conventional wisdom about Twain attributes the "bitter pessimism" of these late writings to such factors as his personal bereavements and financial reversals. Rejecting this view as grossly oversimplified, Dolmetsch argues that the transformation in Twain's outlook and writing style owe much to the cultural currents he encountered abroad, above all in Vienna. He suggests that Twain was especially responsive to a peculiarly Viennese blend of nihilism and hedonism and to the "impressionistic" style favored by its writers. In locating these influences, Dolmetsch portrays a Mark Twain far more cosmopolitan and urbane than previous biographical studies have allowed. Through meticulous research in Viennese newspaper reports as well as in Twain's own journals and writings, Dolmetsch reconstructs the writer's visit in breathtaking detail. The narrative sparkles with accounts of Twain's shrewd manipulation of the Viennese press, his involvements in the city's musical and theatrical life, the attacks he endured from anti-Semitic journalists, and even his futile attempts to obtain marketing rights to two inventions by a Polish engineer. In one particularly intriguing chapter Dolmetsch ponders the riddle of Twain's association with Freud (who was then virtually unknown outside of Vienna) and their congruent fascination with the relationship between dreams and "reality." An invaluable addition to Twain scholarship, "Our Famous Guest" is equally compelling for the glimpse it offers of a vanished world.




The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg


Book Description

Reproduction of the original: The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain